Just Finished Reading We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas

Stephen King is one of the people I follow on Twitter.  Not that I expect anything of special literary value from his often overtly political posts, but I like to keep up with what's on his mind.  From time to time he recommends a book he's just read...I read Garth Risk Hallberg's novel City on Fire after reading such a Tweet.  The other day he promoted another one, Matthew Thomas's 2014 debut novel We Are Not Ourselves...and I promptly checked it out.  Set primarily in New York City, the author's home town, it is a fictional voyage through the life of Eileen Tumulty/Leary from her childhood with her Irish parents into adulthood and her marriage to Ed Leary, a scientist whose values on materialism sharply clash with her longing to become more high society.  A lot of stories I've read try to make the protagonist into a character of virtuosity: one thing I liked a lot about We Are Not Ourselves is the way that the author, while focusing on Eileen's point of view, revealed many flaws in her personality and how her behavior often aggravated relational problems she had with others, most particularly her husband and son.  Ultimately, though, what won this novel over for me was the way it depicted the debilitating and fatal Alzheimer's Disease, from the initial stages of divergent behavior with its accompanying denials and rationalizing, to the final stage of complete incapacity...how sad.  This was a difficult book to get through, but not for any fault of Matthew Thomas and his adroit writing.  He plunged head first into real, often very unlikeable characters as well as dealing with a topic that for many has eclipsed their lives, if not as Alzheimer's patients than as their caretakers...along with a stinging indictment of the American health care system that, even in the era of Obamacare, forces families into bankrupt conditions just to obtain needed government assistance...

If you want to read a story about people who are "real", warts and all, and don't expect the author to sugarcoat your reading experience, then you just might also like We Are Not Ourselves.  As far as I'm concerned, Stephen King is "two for two" with his book recommendations...