Lost in Thought
by Deborah Serra
“Not everything is meant to know, Ilana. Some things need their mystery to survive.”
Ilana has an enviable job at the opera house, a committed relationship, and a cozy Greenwich Village apartment, but the questions inside of her are growing insistent. Is it due to her scientist boyfriend’s research on how people make their decisions, or is she suffering suppressed grief from the death of her adoptive mother? She becomes curious about who she would be if she’d grown up in her birth home. Is she truly who she thinks she is? Has she ever freely chosen anything at all? When Ilana learns that her birth mom owns a pub upstate, well, what harm could there be in furtively dropping by for a drink? To see, just to see. What begins as curiosity about her choices evolves into a traumatic shift in her world. She loses control of her life. And then, chaos.
Lost in Thought is a novel about unconscious decision-making and the illusion of free will.
My Rating:
Favorite Quotes:
All the flippancy of the evening disappeared. They sank into an earnest whisper. They spoke to each other like kids sharing mysteries while perched in a tree house and rapt in the quiet woods.
You’re born. You get so many minutes. You die. That’s kinda it. How you spend your minutes is the only thing.
Saint Bernadette’s was a dismal boarding house in the center of the city. The nuns performed their earthly penance by running it. They were brittle women, sexless, and looking longingly toward death.
They sat in quiet companionship. Ilana knew for all the gifts that life had given her— her privileged education, her quiet good looks, her sense of practicality— it was the gift of this friendship that she most treasured.
“He’s not a piece of real property.” “True, there is very little real about him at this point— not his teeth, his hair, his left knee, his right hip, or his erection. He is more a collage of spare parts.”
She strikes me as a woman who would ride a llama bareback through a burning building in a pair of crotchless panties if she damn well felt like it.
Whenever Willow had an idea, she made lists, and most of the time, ecstatic intentions aside, the only thing she actually accomplished was the list.
What was not being said was getting loud inside the silence.
My Review:
This was not a happy ever-after romance, this was a coming into oneself women’s fiction tale with characters who were imperfect, realistically flawed, and struggling with real-world issues, work, and personal baggage. While at times I felt conflicted with the vagaries of the storylines when they were not going in the direction I expected or hoped for, kudos must be given to this clever author for her writing style. It was profoundly perceptive, poignant, insightful, and well-nuanced with authentic quirk, while eloquently detailed in a witty brain-teasing manner in magnificent Technicolor. I had to whittle down several pages of favorite quotes for those to include in this review.
DEBORAH SERRA is a recipient of the Hawthornden Literary Fellowship, a semifinalist for the Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Award, and nominated for the O. Henry Prize. She has been published in literary magazines and is an editor with the ethics and short story magazine, After Dinner Conversation. Serra is the author of the thriller, Primal, and the humorous travel memoir,
2 Broads Abroad. She has written numerous TV films and episodes, including two years as a staff writer. She has worked for Showtime, CBS, NBC, Sony, Fox, and Lifetime, and is a member of WGA, DG, and PEN USA.
