The story is brilliant. It's a fun read I picked up in Provincetown while I was on vacation. I started it the next week while I was in Chicago and want to finish it before I go back to work tomorrow. Not quite there, but very close. The book has kept my interest, and now it's become compelling. I spent much of the day with a cup of tea, reading.
And thinking.
The brief? A teenager is at a fair with her two best friends and has her fortune told by a traveling fortune teller. The four sentences completely change the trajectory of the girl's life. It becomes swallowed by the ideas of betrayal, slow demise, the hope for justice, and the likelihood of her own murder. She spends the rest of her life investigating anyone who might possibly have a motive for murdering her and creates a murder board for her potential heirs to work with following her (actual) murder.
The story brings up the question of how we shape our lives by what we think about and what we think we know. Frances, who we meet only as a murder victim and through her youthful journal recollections, is ruined by her belief in the fortune. Of course, once she receives it her innocence is lost and she is never able to "know" anything else.
It reminds me of the story in the Bible of Adam and Eve and what they became after they ate the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The story is about what happens when innocence is lost, about how knowledge we're not ready for or capable of handling can destroy the direction of our lives. Relationships are destroyed across the board, and there is no coming back from that in the sense of restoring what has been lost. Something new is created.
There's no point wondering what might have been if Frances had not had this experience. She did. Or if Adam and Eve had listened to God's wisdom and enjoyed the other fruit available to them. They didn't. Both stories are great cautionary tales around the power of our thinking and the things that shape us.
I've been thinking about this a lot these days, especially with everything that comes across my social media feeds. The raw existential dread that rises like bile as I think about the decay of our social structures and the things we once trusted as scaffolding for our society. Core values seem no longer to be core. We haven't had a complete collapse yet, and I wonder whether we will continue to shape collapse or whether we'll begin to shape a different response to our fear and worry around what we are becoming, around what is happening around us. There are days that I feel torn between watching with horror and feeling powerless to change what I cannot control. As I move through the story of the book I am reading, I feel a certain kinship with the main character. It's funny how an otherwise light read can reach deeply into us and break something open.
Fall-ing In Love: 40 Days of Noticing is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.
Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.
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