A review by dillarhonda
Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison

Just about the only thing that is clear about the protagonist in Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever, is that she’s having a terribly hard time. Told in snippets occasionally only a few words long and accompanied by numbers or headings as though scribbled on index cards, the plot comes out in drips and drabs. She seems to be a Hollywood script doctor, she seems to own a cat, she seems to have gone insane. Robison’s deadpan humor peppers the mundane horrors of a life slid off the rails. As the protagonist lurches through existence, at a remove from her own narration, it’s unclear how much time has passed, where in the world she is at any moment, and whether anything of what she says is true. But as you piece together the splintered fragments, you can’t help but feel for this woman so disjointed and in so much pain.