My Real Children, by Jo Walton

[rachelmanija]

I read this when it first came out; please correct and forgive inaccuracies of memory. (Appropriate to the story!)

Patricia, an Alzheimer's patient, is in a nursing home. The nurses think that she recalls living two completely different lives (and is slipping between realities now) because she has dementia; we, the readers, know that she's recalling alternate timelines.

In 1949, she agreed to a marriage proposal, or not. The woman who agreed became Trish, trapped in a miserably abusive marriage... but also living in the best possible world as far as the general good is concerned, with peace, prosperity, and a moon base. The woman who declined became Pat, who falls in love with a woman, travels, and has a life full of love and self-fulfillment... in a world that slides into nightmarish total war, and seems to headed straight for Armageddon.

Though there are plenty of full scenes with dialogue and so forth, there's also a lot of summary narration. This works surprisingly well; my interest only flagged in the last fifth or so, when I started losing track of the multiplicity of alternate children and grandchildren and their significant others. It's a book about two largely mundane lives that inexplicably has the narrative grip of a thriller. I credit Walton's writing skill for this, and I'm still not sure how she did it. Between the depressingness and the summarizing, by all rights I should have bounced off this book rather than reading it in a day.

I didn't write about the book till now because I had such mixed feelings about it. Artistically, it's very well-done - an unusual use of tell-not-show that succeeds in (mostly) being compelling reading. However, I also found it excruciatingly depressing. It deals centrally with five of my top ten most depressing subjects: Alzheimer's disease, agonizing death by cancer, nuclear war, domestic violence and emotional abuse, and being consigned in a nursing home where you're helpless and mistreated and cut off from everything that makes life bearable.

Regarding the alternate timelines, the ending strongly implied that it was Patricia's choice of who to marry that led to sweeping changes between the timelines. I assume it was a "butterfly effect" in which she made one small change that led to several other small changes that ended up having a gigantic domino effect, but I would have liked to be able to see some of how that happened. I couldn't figure out what it was she did that was important. If I recall correctly, history started changing in big ways right after she either got married or didn't. Trish did get involved in political volunteering, but if I recall correctly, history had already changed at that point. Am I misremembering when history started to change, and it was the volunteering after all? Or was there some other crucial action that I missed?

Comments

[vass]

Oh yeah. That one. I had some things to say about the ending, from the perspective of someone with obsessive-compulsive symptoms.

tl;dr version: going through your life believing that anything you do could magically doom or save the entire world in ways that have no causal connection to that actions themselves will really fuck you up.

Walton herself showed up in the comments to comment that she does live her life that way (specifically, she said she lives as if each choice is simultaneously world-changing and insignificant), and it doesn't fuck her up, it makes her happy. So.

[recessional]

Yeah, the persistent belief that anything I do - especially anything I do that ends well for me - makes the universe a worse place is a significant contributer to my worst suicidal days.

[asakiyume]

ikd, butterfly effect or no butterfly effect, this seems to imbue our actions with way, way too much significance.

You know, I'm really wondering about the butterfly effect, now. It's a fun theory but there are an AWFUL LOT of butterflies out there. Who is there to trace the path and measure the influence of each and every butterfly? The protagonist of this book may have done or failed to do X, Y, or Z, but what about all the other people in the world, doing similar. She alone is the the fulcrum on which the world tips?

Is it really implied in the book that it comes down to her?

[recessional]

Of course it does: I've just got two sets of mental illness going on and a neuroatypicality that lends itself to perseverative rumination, which makes it pernicious and unavoidable. Thus my serious side-eye of, if the book does, the implication that Patricia's choice was the difference and, if it was, that the difference literally hinged on ending up in an abusive, miserable relationship as the way that she chooses the good fate for the world.

Like I'm not saying the book is Evol or anything: just that my gut reaction to the ideas being presented is EUGHWHAT? NO THANK YOU.

[asakiyume]

*nodding*

I feel the same way.

[yhlee]

The butterfly effect is a perfectly good result in what happens in deterministic nonlinear systems ("chaos," a term that I wince at because it messes up nonmathematicians who not unreasonably think it means something the mathematics doesn't imply). The issue with applying it to actual real-world butterflies (so to speak) is that the systems become massive beyond our current ability to solve for them or approximate them.

Nota bene: I'm not a mathematician, but my B.A. is in math and I'm familiar with the basics.

[asakiyume]

I can definitely see how the systems would quickly become too massive.

[yhlee]

The number of math equations we know how to deal with is way smaller (to be non-technical) than the ones we know how to deal with, especially when you get to the nonlinear stuff. *g* Which is why we have things like numerical rather than exact solutions in diff-eq, etc.