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It Chooses You (2011)

by Miranda July(Favorite Author)

3.82 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1936365014 (ISBN13: 9781936365012)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

McSweeney's Publishing

review 1: One thing that annoyed me in miranda's mind on this book in particular is how she poorly exchanged empathy with all those people from the "pennysaver". It looked like as if she was using them more for selfish reasons than for truely knowing them. I can imagine myself on that situation, and i think i would have been more present in the moment. Sometimes, i even felt her kinda dodgy - except for Joe, the last pennysaver, for whom she really felt something deeper - but then again, she finishes the book asking a stupid question to the grieving widow. I love Miranda July, but she seemed a little selfish in the Big picture of this book.
review 2: I would never have bought this. In fact, I saw it in the bookstore and despite the fact that I loved Miranda July's first... more book, I didn't buy it. I'm so happy my friend gave me her copy to test read for her. I loved this. July is a writer who makes me feel like my own existence need not be called into question ever. Example 1: "In my paranoid world every storekeeper thinks I'm stealing, every man thinks I'm a prostitute or a lesbian, every woman thinks I'm a lesbian or arrogant, and every child and animal sees the real me and it is evil."Example 2: "The moral of these people was clear to me: if you spend your life endlessly cruising around the world, never stopping to plant children on dry land, then when you die some Greek lady you don't even know will become the steward of your legacy. And when she wants more room in her house, she sells your legacy in the PennySaver. And no one wants it."Example 3: "It was an act of devotion. A little like writing or loving someone- it doesn't always feel worthwhile, but not giving up somehow creates unexpected meaning over time."Example 4: "All I really want to know is how other people are making it through life-where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it." Example 4.5: "...but more than anything I wanted to grab the hand of myself at sixteen, and the hand of my future daughter, and run."Example 5: "It's not that my life before the internet was so wildly diverse-but there was only one world and it really did have every single thing in it...Most of life is offline, and i think it always will be; eating and aching and sleeping and loving happens in the body."Example 5.5: "So all my time was spent measuring time. While I listened to strangers and tried to patiently have faith in the unknown, I was also wondering how long this would take, and if any of it really mattered compared to having a baby. Word on the street was that it did not. Nothing mattered compared to having a baby....The only thing between me and death was this child. If I delayed having the child, then I could also delay death, sort of. So i was in a hurry to step across the void so I could make the movie so I could have a child before it was too late-and i was also secretly not in a hurry." Example6: "And yet the visit was suffused with death. Real death: the graves of all those cats and dogs, the widows he shopped for, and his own death, which he referred to more than once-but matter-of-factly, like it was a deadline that he was trying to get a lot of things done before. I sensed he'd been making his way through his to-do list for eighty-one years, and was always behind, and this made everything urgent and bring, even now, especially now. "Example 7: "Maybe I had miscalculated what was left of my life. Maybe it wasn't loose change. Or, actually, the whole thing was loose change, from start to finish-many, many little moments, each holiday, each Valentine, each year unbearably repetitive and yet somehow always new. You could never buy anything with it, you could never cash it in for something more valuable or more whole. It was just all these days, held together only by the fragile memory of one person-or, if you were lucky, two. And because of this, this lack of inherent meaning or value, it was stunning. Like the most intricate, radical piece of art, the kind of art I was always trying to make. It dared to mean nothing and so demanded everything of you."I love this stuff, very much love it with pretty much every part of me. I love the pictures too. less

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