My Life in Fiction

My audio books as of late have had a habit of mirroring, or at the very least, commenting on my own personal current events.

Starting with The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet in which a young Chinese boy befriends and falls in love with a young Japanese girl in WWII Seattle. I began reading this as I started planning our few days in Seattle this summer to precede the take-off of our Alaskan cruise. Not only did I enjoy the story very much, but I also planned an afternoon of our Seattle adventure to be centered around the hotel in the title of the book, the Panama Hotel.

A book or two later, I embarked upon the story of a lifelong friendship between two women that, in that genre, is always destined to end badly. And it did, right around the same time and in much the same way as my friend Lisa's life ended. So for the long rides up to her house and back, the ending of that audio book added to my already healthy fall of tears.

And now, another book about female friendships - not sure why I landed on this genre as of late; the library seems to always be out of the other books that I'd prefer to read. It too is apparently following the familiar pattern of ending in tragedy and this tragedy is too much like Lisa's. A cancer that has metastasized to the liver but the primary node cannot be found. And now I understand the trepidation that came along with Lisa's chemo treatments, that without knowing what cells to attack, the chemo needed to be more general which is a danger to healthy cells as well as unhealthy ones.

What next: a book about camping in Indiana? Hopefully it will be more light-hearted - it's damn hard to drive with tears in your eyes.