Making It Up (original 2005; edition 2006)

I still love the concept, but the execution isn't what I'd hoped for. The book club discussion should be interesting, and I'd like to read some of her other fiction. ( )

This really fired my imagination for some reason; I'm not sure I know why. It's a collection of short stories, which aren't really my favourite thing. They are loosely coupled together as being offshoots from Penelope Lively's own life. It's the old alternate history game made personal: "What if my life had taken a different turn?". And I found it quite compelling. It's all fiction but weakly linked together with fact and I found the junctions and the similarities and differences between the alternates lives interesting.

I really can't pick my favorite Lively novel, but this collection of what-could-have-been vignettes is certainly up there. Lively's usual delicious prose, combined with hints of autobiography, is twisted into fiction spanning the 40s-80s. I'm not sure I can pick a favorite story or permutation of Lively. I can't recommend this book enough! ( )

I read this novel for book club, so didn’t exactly know what I was getting into – just knew the basic premise that the author was writing an ‘anti-memoir’, versions of her life that were possible but didn’t exist. Although I’d pictured something else, I wasn’t disappointed. Lively’s prose is unobtrusive, but detailed, with well-chosen phrasing. The book is really more like a series of stories, connected by the author’s introduction to what actually happened and how it could have changed. I appreciated the fact that while some of the stories were obvious in how different her life would have been – her death in a couple, her husband going off to war, moving to the US and marrying an American – others just described small changes (in one, she goes on an archaeological dig, but there’s no indication it changed her career – just that she would remember it for a long time). After I’d read some of the stories, it seemed like the actual plot for a few of them could be a cliché – the caring nanny dealing with a shy charge and self-involved mother, the girl who becomes a conservative control freak after her upbringing with a hippie-type mother – but I never thought about it while I was reading, due to the already established framework and Lively’s prose and attention to detail. In many stories, the ‘Penelope’ character is just a side note to the action which was a nice way to vary narrators. I was surprised that she didn’t adhere a little more closely to reality by having all the characters with their correct name (only in a couple was she named Penelope) though this stopped bothering me after awhile. Also, I was hoping she’d depict the moment where the alternative history started – the crucial, but seemingly insignificant decisions that led the change. ( )

I liked this book very much. The "anti-memoir" angle was very interesting and the prose was engaging and enjoyable. Now I have a new author to read! My favorite passage is: "It seems to me that writing is an extension of reading-a step that not every obsessive reader is impelled to take, but, for those who do so, one that springs from serendipitous reading. Books beget books." ( )