The whole way through this book I really wasn’t sure whether it was a novel or a memoir (I downloaded it onto my kindle and clearly just skipped past the cover page without a second glance since I now see that it obviously states it is the latter). What’s more, I really didn’t care either way!
The author does such a good job of making daily life for her family (transported from Maine to Beijing for two years) seem real to the reader that after a while I just stopped wondering whether it was imaginary or factual. It simply did not matter since either way I was vicariously living Beijing life along with the main character Susan (who, yes, also happens to be the author of the book). From her attempts to persuade her kids to take the terrifying school bus, to the bemusing experience of attempting to buy apples, to the bewilderment concerning what, exactly, a sweater party is, the frustrations of trying to get real world news on the Chinese internet and TV and to her wholly endearing terror when she thinks she’s about to get busted for buying pirated, non-government approved DVDs we experience everything along with Susan in HD and full living color! We feel what she feels, see what she sees, laugh, cry, exult and puzzle alongside her.
Even when cancer strikes, the author somehow manages to make the experience of this disease entirely real to the reader. We can still empathise with her. We still live life along with her.
Novel or memoir, it is regardless a remarkable feat of writing ability to create such reality. To bring along your readers in such a convincing way, to suck them into the goings on of your daily life in a way that doesn’t feel fake or contrived. To make them fully experience everything, rather than just passively observe. This is what I really look for in a good book. When I say that a book seems real, I mean that during the course of reading it, it has become real to me.
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