Status Updates From Last Night in Montreal

Other themes - how our memories are impermanent, unreliable. They fade over time, dissolve, and what we think we remember is often our own imagination filling in the blanks.
We have the ability to recreate ourselves, our own identity, simply by what we choose to remember about ourselves and about the other people in our life.

“ In Arizona, he stood before the pay phone in the noonday sun. He could almost see her there in front of him, a ghost, a mirage, dialing a number dredged up from some recess of childhood memory. He turned back toward the motel.”

The 4th novel I’ve read by St John Mandel.
Recurrent themes across the four - motels/hotels, windows, a sense of transience and an inability to feel rooted or tied to a place.

These last few chapters leading into part three really upsettingly explore how fragile domestic stability can be when individuals prioritize their own obsessions or escapes over family bonds. I love how Emily St. John Mandel tells really big stories that still manage to feel incredibly intimate.