The Story of You by Julie MyersonBlue Archipelago Reviews

The Story of You

Format:	Hardback
Pages:	312
Published:	January, 2006
ISBN:	978-0224078016

My Book Review Rating:

Synopsis

This book begins with snow, the story of you.

It is a freezing room in a student house, a sagging mattress on the floor, and two people, one nineteen, the other twenty, kissing passionately, all night.

It is to this scene that, twenty years later, Rosy, the narrator of Julie Myerson’s astonishing novel, returns obsessively. She has just lost a child in a terrible, careless accident, and Tom, her partner, has taken her to Paris to forget about things, to start again. It has snowed in the night and, waking at dawn, Rosy decides to go for a walk. At the hotel desk there’s a note for her: ‘I’m waiting for you X.’ And he is, sitting in the corner of a cafe as she enters almost at random. They talk. He touches her. She turns away and when she looks again he is gone.

Was he there? Had she dreamed him? And why, when he e-mails her out of the blue two days later, does he write as though they haven’t met for twenty years?

Why did you decide to read this book?

I mooched this book a couple of years ago, and if I’m honest I can’t remember if it was because I read a review of it, or because someone wanted to swap and this was the only book on their list that looked interesting. Anyway, as I’ve never read a novel by Julie Myerson before I added this to my list for the New Authors 2010 challenge.

What did you like about this book?

Oh my goodness, I don’t even know where to start to answer that question! Myerson’s prose is almost poetic, and I found myself entranced from the very first paragraph. The story is beautifully written as Myerson weaves together memories of an encounter many years ago with the story of today.

Rosy, the central character and the voice of the novel is battling to keep her family life on track following the tragic death of her youngest daughter. When her husband takes her away to Paris she takes a walk in the snow at the crack of dawn and meets a man who was once the boy she spent the night with more than twenty years ago on that memorable night that continues to haunt her.

When she returns home she strikes up an email conversation with the man, who behaves as though they haven’t seen each other for twenty years.

Myerson weaves the past and the present together in such a way that the true account of her daughter’s tragic death isn’t made clear until more than half way through the novel. The relationship she has with Tom, her almost-husband, is a stark contrast to the affair she strikes up with “you”, the man who understands her in a way no one else ever has, and whose name the reader never learns.

I couldn’t put this book down as I wanted to know more about the events of the past, and whether Rosy’s lover really existed; I wondered whether he was real, a figment of her imagination, a ghost or even an hallucination.

The Story of You took my breath away, made my heart ache and made me think about the preciousness of love, relationships and the simple gestures and understandings that draw people together.

It’s been almost three days since I finished reading the book and I still find myself thinking about it, which is why I’ve decided to award The Story of You by Julie Myerson the elusive 6 star rating!

Share a quote from the book

“It begins with snow, the story of you. I’ve tried so many other beginnings. I’ve had it begin with heat, with light, in another country – wilder, dirtier, poorer – in another bed, not this one. But each time I come zooming back to that house in the most run-down part of the city and that freezing black night when we kissed for so many hours, you and me – a ferocious kind of kissing that took us both by surprise, coming as it did out of nowhere and going on until the sky grew pale and we both slept.”

About the Author

Julie Myerson was born in Nottingham in 1960. She read English at Bristol University and in addition to writing both fiction and non-fiction books, she is also known for having written a long-running column in The Guardian entitled “Living with Teenagers” based on her own family experiences.

Her fifth novel, Something Might Happen (2003) explored the devastating effect of a brutal murder on the inhabitants of a small seaside town in Suffolk and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Her most recent book, The Lost Child (2009) is the story of her son’s battle with a drug addiction; it was the centre of a media controversy as Myerson was accused of betraying her son for her own ambition.

Bibliography