Jennifer (Insert Lit Pun)'s Reviews > After You'd Gone

This book wrecked me. It follows a woman named Alice who’s in a coma after stepping into traffic, and her family doesn’t know whether or not it was a suicide attempt. The narrative jumps around to all different periods of her life, focusing on her relationship with her lover, John – a relationship that we learn has ended, but we don’t know why. We also get snippets of her mother and grandmother’s lives.
The writing overall wasn’t my favorite. Mostly I thought there were too many adjectives (she never uses one when she could use two or three, and I recognized this because it’s one of the flaws in my own writing), and sometimes the verb choices were strange and distracting. And there are several cases of insta-love that taken collectively would’ve bothered me more in another book.
But really, I loved this novel. So much of the writing is beautiful in a slightly disjointed way (which I viewed as intentional, given the characters’ mental states), and the whole story happens in that emotional space where your chest aches and you feel tears pressing behind your eyes. The way O’Farrell crafts Alice and John’s relationship is gorgeous. She captures that feeling of being completely comfortable with someone, and loving them more than you ever thought you could.
Having finished the story I feel emotionally fragile and like I might burst into tears if someone looks at me the wrong way. I’ll be reading all of O’Farrell’s backlist, I think – I’m just in the mood for her tone and imagery.