Page 19 - Real Style July 2018

They’re people. They have decisions they want to make.”
It’s not just the characters that go their own way, though. According to Brown, the story changes as well.
“A lot of times you’ll write the first draft and you write what people expect because that’s what you also expect,” Brown says. “Then later, as you go through the revision, you’re able to see, ‘Well, okay, what would be another way that I could do this.’”
Although she did change some parts of the novel during her rewrites, Brown admits she knew how it would all end.
“Lucy always wanted that happy ending,” Brown said. “I knew that from the very beginning. I typically don’t know the ending of my stories until I’m about three quarters of the way through my first draft. Most of my endings have been what people would call emotionally satisfying, but they’re definitely deeply sad and so this was a different sort of book for me.”
Although Brown’s ending of the novel is indeed satisfying, it’s not what sticks in your mind once you’ve finished reading it. It’s the idea of a fragile memory that will continue in your thoughts.
“You think your memories are 100 percent accurate,” Brown says, “but
in doing the research for this novel, I learned that we are changing them a little bit every time we think about them. So now I’m certain that my memories are probably only 50 percent accurate, if that. So now I don’t rely on those. Here’s the way I remember it, but it’s probably not totally true.”
Perhaps Brown’s way of looking at memory is how we should all do it, or perhaps we should look at Lucy’s way of living after her accident as a way to live our own lives. “With Lucy I really wanted this to be about choice,” Brown says. “She doesn’t have memories that allow her to see what the next step is so she’s almost having to make that choice a little bit blindly, and through some faith and hope that she’s going to figure it all out.” Something many of us can relate to, good memories or not.
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After bombs go off and Phoebe disappears, Will finds himself spending his time searching for her, hoping that she was not involved in the terrorism that killed five people.
FROM THE CORNER OF THE OVAL
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YOU’RE ON AN AIRPLANE
You might recognize actress Parker Posey from such films as Dazed and Confused and You’ve Got Mail, but unless you’ve seen interviews with her you won’t get a sense of her wry sense of humour. In You’re On An Airplane, Posey opens up about her career,
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