My Real Children - Jo Walton

Alzheimer's is a disease that I think most of the modern world is familiar with now, but it's relatively young in terms of the human race. It's only been recognized as a distinct disease since the beginning of the 20th century. I think it's likely that Alzheimer's has existed for much longer than this, but due to two factors, never in such recognizable numbers as those we see today. One factor is that Alzheimer's was likely lumped in with other forms of dementia, but the other being that only within the last century or so have we as the human race been regularly living into our eighties, nineties, and at times beyond. Aging diseases are more prevalent because we're still alive to experience them. Now, as the baby boomer generation moves into the ages when these diseases are cropping up, we're likely to see more and more memoirs of Alzheimer's and its effect on family members, akin to the cancer memoir or the addiction memoir.

It's seems like a logical progression for these themes to then show up in fantasy and science fiction. Jo Walton does this with such an interesting twist: in the modern day, Patricia is in a nursing home. She remembers two different lives: one where she is Trish, married to Mark and has four children, and President Kennedy was killed by a bomb. One where she is Pat, raising three children with her partner Bee, and President Kennedy declines to rerun for office after the nuclear obliteration of Miami and Kiev. She seems to slip between both of these timelines, remembering some days that the bathroom is on the left, and some days that it is on the right.

What I find most interesting about Patricia's dilemma is not just the idea of which timeline is real, but which timeline does she WANT to be real. Logically they can't both be real--although that is somewhat debatable when we're already playing fast and loose with time and reality--but there's severe advantages and disadvantages to each timeline. As Pat she was much more personally happy with her partner and her life, but the world suffers from nuclear fallout and widespread radiation-induced thyroid cancer. As Trish her personal life is significantly more difficult via her terrible marriage, but the world is much more stable overall. And either way, there's children. How could she choose between her children, knowing that any choice would render the others out of existence? And that's assuming she can even make that choice. She may, for as much time as she has left, spend the rest of her days drifting between these two worlds.

I've been thinking a lot about scene vs summary lately, and this book is a excellent example to bring in to that debate. Often it's really easy for people like myself, who want to write sci fi and fantasy, to slip into just a little too much summary, to get across all the worldbuilding information we feel we need. Scene, however, is a lot more powerful way of delivering that, if more difficult. In scene all that information has to feel natural, or we feel like The Real Inspector Hound: "Hello, the drawing-room of Lady Muldoon's country residence one morning in early spring?...I'm afraid there is no one of that name here, this is all very mysterious and I'm sure it's leading up to something, I hope nothing is amiss for we, that is Lady Muldoon and her houseguests, are here cut off from the world, including Magnus, the wheelchair-ridden half-brother of her ladyship's husband Lord Albert Muldoon who ten years ago went out for a walk on the cliffs and was never seen again--and all alone, for they had no children." Yes, that's dialogue. Stoppard's mocking the dialogue-as-exposition and for good reason: it's awkward, clunky, and completely artificial. So it takes a lighter touch to convey this information in scene than it would in summary, where the narrator can just straight out say what happened in the past.

Walton, however, strikes a really pleasant balance between scene and summary. A lot of this story is covering such a vast amount of time--Patricia's entire life--that it's almost required that a good chunk of it would have to be summary. We can skim over her college years without having to be bogged down into any specific instance, for example. And then we can move seamlessly into the exact moment she met Mark and he walked her home, summarize the next few years that they spent apart, and then right back into scene when he asks her to marry him over the phone. "Now or never," he says, and her answer splits her world right in two.

In addition, this is a very 'quiet' story. It's got a kind of understated drama that I think is a really deft, subtle touch. This is a kind of vibe that I want for a particular piece that I've been working on, so it's really helpful to see a successful example. It appears to not be for everyone--I guess some people really want that high-energy drama--but I found it to be a nice departure from the typical.

“Confused today,” they wrote on her notes. “Confused. Less confused. Very confused.” That last was written frequently, sometimes abbreviated by the nurses to just “VC,” which made her smile, as if she were sufficiently confused to be given a medal for it. Her name was on the notes too—just her first name, Patricia, as if in old age she were demoted to childhood, and denied both the dignity of surname and title and the familiarity of the form of her name she preferred.

Full opening excerpt at Tor.

Overall: 5 stars

Amazon: My Real Children

More reviews:My Real Children on Librarything (Average 4.09 stars)

My Real Children on Goodreads (Average 3.73 stars)