A review by lonesomereader
Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir by Penelope Lively

5.0

Do you think of your life as a narrative? Casting your mind back do you hit upon “landmark” moments that set you on a course to becoming the person you are now? Last year I started spending more time with an acquaintance who I’d casually known for years. Increasingly we discussed books and went to events together although we didn’t really know all that much about each other. So one evening while we were having dinner he suddenly looked up at me and asked “Who are you?” I had to mentally scramble around quite quickly picking up and arranging all those introductory phrases and things you say at social gatherings to present a coherent answer to this. We’re accustomed to constructing narratives, forever tweaking and refining them, to make sense of our lives. It’s not that we necessarily try to fictionalize elements of the past, but that we attempt to make our lives into a complete comprehensible story rather than a series of slapdash experiences dependent upon chance and sporadic bursts of willpower which is the existence of most people. As Lively writes, “Most of us settle for the disconcerting muddle of what we intended and what came along, and try to see it as some kind of whole.” The trouble is that giving an approximate linear shape to our lives doesn’t really convey the experience as it was lived or how that experience has been translated into the memories inside our heads. Penelope Lively is very aware of this problem. Our lives don’t play through like a grand fictional narrative on a movie screen starting at birth and ending in death. Life exists in the sensory moment and in the scattered fragments of memory flitting through our minds throughout every day.

Read my full review on LonesomeReader review of Ammonites & Leaping Fish: A Life in Time by Penelope Lively