You’re Not You
by Michelle Wildgen


  
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Book Description

In You’re Not You, Michelle Wildgen describes a young woman’s coming of age. Bec is drifting through life, barely attending (or attending to) her college classes, sexually involved with (but emotionally distant from) a married professor, when she takes a part time job as a caregiver for thirty-something Kate, whose former life (good marriage, successful advertising executive, fabulous cook, primo decorator) has fallen away as she becomes increasingly debilitated from the progressive ravages of ALS (more popularly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease). As Kate comes more and more to depend on Bec – for dressing, for putting on her makeup, for communication with others – the younger woman discovers that the pale reality of her own shapeless existence is being taken over by Kate’s needs and Kate’s life. Given this set-up, I can perhaps be forgiven for dreading what I imagined was to come: some Gothic pastiche in which a person’s sense of self gradually (and perhaps literally) is lost to the mind and experiences of another person. Bye-bye Bec. But no. Wildgen eschews the cliché, and instead provides us with a psychologically acute and complex tale of a young woman who begins to learns, under emotionally difficult circumstances, who she is and what she wants to be. This is one of those first novels that makes you want to reach out to the writer and say, hurry up and write: I want to read your second novel.