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Lori Carson

Auteur de The Original 1982: A Novel

4+ oeuvres 40 utilisateurs 3 critiques

Œuvres de Lori Carson

The Original 1982: A Novel (2013) 36 exemplaires
Stars (1999) 1 exemplaire
Where It Goes 1 exemplaire

Oeuvres associées

Strange Days: Music From The Motion Picture (1995) — Contributeur — 11 exemplaires

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From The Book Wheel:

Have you ever wondered what your life would be like if you could go back and do it all over again? If you have, then you’ll race through this book that does exactly that. Author (and singer/songwriter) Lisa Carson’s The Original 1982 is way of rewriting her life after having an abortion (this is on page 3 and is all over Goodreads, so it’s not a spoiler).

Addressed to the daughters he never had, Lisa constructs an entire life for her daughter and herself from the early days of pregnancy and on through high school. Steeped in the reality that not everything is always rosy, Lisa’s daughter endures the trials and tribulations that the average girl experiences (and then some). This was, perhaps, my favorite part about the story because when you’re rewriting your own life, you can make it anything you want it to be and Lisa opted to stay in the realm of the possible.

While the description of the book makes it seem as if there is a lot of flipping back and forth between the original 1982 and the real one, the book mostly takes place in the fictitious version of the story. There are times when Lisa punctuates a story with what happened in her real life to keep the reader grounded, but mostly it served to remind me that this girl never existed.

For the full review, click here.
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Signalé
thebookwheel | 2 autres critiques | Aug 1, 2013 |
Singer and songwriter Lori Carson makes her fictional debut with The Original 1982. To be perfectly frank, I'm entirely unfamiliar with her music, and didn't recognize the name as someone famous. What drew me to the book was the parallel lives premise, which recalled Lionel Shriver's The Post-Birthday World. Such premises call to me, because, really, who hasn't wondered about the alternate ways a life could go.

As I mentioned, I know almost nothing about Lisa Carson's life, but I feel fairly confident making the assumption that The Original 1982 is largely autobiographical. The whole novel feels very personal, and, honestly, there doesn't seem to be an effort to hide that the writing thereof is a journey for Carson. The heroine's name is Lisa Nelson, and at least one of the songs mentioned is one that appeared on one of Lisa Carson's albums, or at least a song of the same title. Like Lori, Lisa is a musician, a singer and songwriter.

In The Original 1982, Carson considers what Lisa's life might have become had she not aborted her pregnancy in 1982. Nelson faces the classic choice of career or family. In the original 1982, she chose her career, and became somewhat famous. In this imagined 1982, she keeps the baby, raising a daughter, Minnow, largely alone. Though she keeps playing, motherhood is a job in itself and she has to earn money to support them, so she doesn't have enough time to ever make it big. In one life, she is successful and lonely; in the other, unknown but with a lovely daughter.

Carson uses second person fairly effectively here, and I say that as a person who really does not enjoy a second person narrative. This is what makes the novel feel so personal: it's addressed wholly to Minnow, her Little Fish. Lisa Nelson is talking to the daughter that could have existed, and the loss of that person she never knew is visceral. Of course, the second person also has another interpretation, perhaps inadvertent. The reader, presumably a fan of Carson's music, is a child of a sort too, a brainchild born at the expense of an actual child, using the simplified logic of the novel.

The writing style, while not one that necessarily appeals to me, does have a unique cadence, no doubt influenced by her songwriting. The sentence structures are often odd and slightly offbeat. The style does very much suit the story and the character.

What might have been more effective in telling this story is the framework that most stories of this nature use (The Post-Birthday World and Pivot Point are good examples), wherein the story starts and ends in roughly the same place, and the chapters in between alternate futures. Instead, Carson largely focuses on the imagined 1982, occasionally dropping information on what she was doing in the original 1982. This felt really disorganized. Then, when her daughter reached her teen years, the imagined narrative ceased and the novel turned to the actual 2010, focusing on that for thirty pages. The alternating pattern allows for better comparison of the two, and I feel like a lot was left out of both timelines, perhaps because Carson hit what she needed for her own state of mind, but not for mine.

In the end, Carson's book is an interesting one, but not one I am the ideal audience for. At 25, I've not been through any experiences like Carson's. I've never been pregnant, so I don't live with the question of how my life might have been different were I a mother or not a mother. For those who have lived through such things, this might be a powerful read, but it did not resonate with me.
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½
 
Signalé
A_Reader_of_Fictions | 2 autres critiques | Jul 12, 2013 |
The past is immutable, fixed, never changing. You can only change your future. Each decision you make, large or small, impacts the direction that your future takes and changes who you are. Unlike the future, which is still to be writ, we say the past is over and done with. But since it only exists in memory, why can't you change it? Why can't you go back and imagine a different past, one that hinges on a single decision you made, one that you now reverse in your memory, altering your future? You can write your own past and create an imagined present and future. You can create a new story of you. This is the premise in Lori Carson's bittersweet new novel The Original 1982.

Looking back on her life thus far, Lisa pinpoints one decision that forever changed the path her life took and she wonders what would have happened had she chosen differently. In the original 1982, she is a young woman working as a waitress and trying to break into the music business. Her boyfriend is a famous Latin musician and when she accidentally gets pregnant, he convinces her to have an abortion and her life proceeds on from there. But what if she'd kept the baby? What then? Just how would her life be different? Lisa addresses the tale of her imagined life to her almost daughter Minnow, telling her about their life together, the ways in which things would have changed and the surprising ways in which some things would have remained the same or achieved the same outcome. In creating the past for a life she chose not to live, Lisa sometimes gives a nod to the original 1982 and the way that her life did in fact unfold over the years.

The novel alternates between these appreciably different lives but focuses much more on Lisa's freshly imagined life than the original. While Lisa's life as it actually happened holds no surprises for her as she narrates, her imagined life is awash in the possibilities towards which having Minnow would have steered her. And yet this fully realized ode to herself and to the memory of her baby never born, life is not easy or always happy. She struggles and falls, sacrifices and compromises in this imagined existence too. And this makes the imagining that much more poignant, haunting, and truly more realistic. No life was ever going to be perfect. Carson has captured the ache, the longing, and the regret for the road not taken beautifully and imaginatively here. Lisa is certainly telling her invented story "with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence" with all the melancholy, quiet emotion which that phrase captures. Readers in search of an unusual read, one that resonates with the power of storytelling and the invention of a life will find it here in this short grace-filled novel of what might have been.
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Signalé
whitreidtan | 2 autres critiques | May 29, 2013 |

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Statistiques

Œuvres
4
Aussi par
1
Membres
40
Popularité
#370,100
Évaluation
½ 3.5
Critiques
3
ISBN
2