I See You Everywhere by Julia Glass

I See You Everywhere is the story of two sisters, Clem and Lousia.  Clem is slightly more adventurous than Louisa, but Louisa has more refined tastes.  It’s a collection of random events starting with the death of an aunt and the divvying up of her possessions.   This is followed by tales of the sisters various loves and loses, adventures with whales and artists, a battle with cancer, and the kidnapping of a pack of hunting hounds.

We meet lovers, parents, and co-workers.  Life, such as it is, goes on.  We trudge along in the wake of the sisters and then near the end there is a sudden jump in time and feeling as one sister laments the death of the other.    The adventurous sister has killed herself.  WTF?  I am as baffled by this as everyone in the book.  Clem was a dynamic and vibrant character who wandered from one lost cause to another, but she didn’t strike me as at all suicidal.  Her death was not a moving event, it was just something that happened and had to be dealt with.  The death of a young bear on the operating table was given more feeling.

I See You Everywhere left me feeling that I had missed something along the way, and maybe I had.  The audio book was not very well recorded and there were times when I had to struggle to hear the story over the noise of the road.

I had never heard of Julia Glass when I picked up the audio book of I See You Everywhere.  I had never heard her story.  So I didn’t know this was a semi-autobiographical story and that her sister had killed herself.  But now that I do know that, the random and fairly pointless events in I See You Everywhere make a bit more sense.  But the blindside of the wild girl’s suicide still makes no sense, and it doesn’t really help that Julia Glass adds another chapter to tell us, hey, suicide makes no sense.

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