When I Was Young & In My Prime (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
A young woman watches and experiences her grandparents' slow disintegration - mental in the case of her grandmother, her grandfather’s is physical. As well, she describes and analyzes her own life and relationship with her partner. But the story is equally her grandparents’ own. I liked the way the multiple voices interleaved, each one told in the first person, so it was sometimes not immediately apparent who was talking. The monologues – most only a page or two at a time – are very powerful and dramatic, full of self-awareness without being sentimental at all. They are interspersed with other material like a list of birds, excerpts from a reference or an information sheet about Alzheimers’, fragments of verse or quotations and so on. Munce is a poet so that style is understandable but after a while it started to resemble a collage and I thought it disturbed the flow of the monologues. Overall though I liked the book very much except - or maybe because - it was uncomfortably familiar territory, an experience we’ll all have to face sooner or later.
What do You think about When I Was Young & In My Prime (2005)?
