489. Watch Me Disappear
Rating: ☆☆☆
Recommended by:
Author: Janelle Brown
Genre: Fiction, Romance, Mystery, Thriller
358 pages, published July 11, 2017
Reading Format: Audio Book
Summary
Watch Me Disappear tells the story of Billie, Olive and Jonathan, a family that is torn apart when Mom Billie disappears while on a solo hiking trek and is presumed dead. Olive and Jonathan are left to cope and wonder what happened.
Quotes
“Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are.”
“You don’t realize how much you’ll miss the asphyxiating intimacy of early parenthood until you can finally breathe again.”
“All people are unknowable, no matter how close you may think you are. Of the millions of thoughts we all think every day, of the millions of experiences we have, how many do we allow other people to know about? A handful? And no one willingly shares their worst, do they? The flaws you see, those are like the very tip of an iceberg. So we’re all just poking around on the surface, trying to figure out the people we love with a kind of, I guess, naïve idealism.”
“Only someone fearful of his own ordinariness would buy, so unquestioningly, someone else’s extraordinariness. Maybe this is why they say love is blind: Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are.”
“You believe what you think you believe, until suddenly, you realize that you don’t anymore. Or maybe you do believe, but it’s no longer convenient to do so, so you decide to forget. You decide to find other beliefs, ones that more comfortably fit the constantly evolving puzzle of your life. To put it more finely: There are those beliefs that you will carry with you until the end of your days. A belief in friendliness; a belief in long vacations; a belief in the power of the press and the merits of good coffee. And then there are the beliefs that seem so vital when you are young, but that the passing years steadily leach out of you: a belief in not selling out; a belief in the superiority of the artist; a belief in hardwood floors and staying fit and your ability to change the world. Most of all: a belief that love is forever, that you can climb into a stranger’s heart and know that person and be known in return.”
“Take two people with a mutual willingness to connect, convince them to expose their innermost thoughts, and presto: true love.”
“Think about what a miracle it is that we’re all working in concert with one another. Every day humans get a fresh chance to decide whether we’re going to destroy each other or build a better world, and you know what? For the most part, we do the latter.”
“It didn’t seem fair, and then that love could fizzle,curdle, ossify into something less wonderful than what it once was. And then you were stuck, because, ultimately, love is a kind of trap. Once you find it, you can’t deviate from that commitment without everyone getting hurt. You can’t just leave. Instead, need wins out over freedom; and everyone stands around feeling wounded and bitter, letting inertia take over.”
My Take
I picked up Watch Me Disappear after reading and loving Janelle Brown’s taut, page turning thriller Pretty Things. I didn’t enjoy Watch Me Disappear nearly as much and it took me a lot longer to finish than it should have, but it was still a decent read with some ideas to ponder.
