A review by sararmn
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

4.0

I was not happy as a child, although from time to time I was content. I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

They could not truly look dead, because they did not ever look alive.

I don't remember how the dreams started. But that's the way of dreams, isn't it?

"That's the trouble with living things. Don't last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together."

I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who I was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn't me, and I knew it wasn't, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what was me?

I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were.

But Lettie was just a girl, even if she was a big girl, even if she was eleven, even if she had been eleven for a very long time. Ursula Monkton was an adult. It did not matter, at that moment, that she was every monster, every witch, every nightmare made flesh. She was also an adult, and when adults fight children, adults always win.

"I want to remember," I said. "Because it happened to me. And I'm still me."

"Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don't. I don't. People are much more complicated than that. It's true of everybody."

"I'm going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world."

Adults should not weep, I knew. They did not have mothers who would comfort them.

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.

"Nothing's ever the same," she said. "Be it a second later or a hundred years. It's always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans."

It's hard enough being alive, trying to survive in the world and find your place in it, to do the things you need to do to get by, without wondering if the thing you just did, whatever it was, was worth someone having, if not died, then having given up her life.

I wondered what had happened to her, and then I thought, it doesn't matter that I can't remember the details any longer: death happened to her. Death happens to all of us.

"You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear."