I See You Everywhere by Julia Glass

As an English teacher (on hiatus) I am compelled to begin by discussing the theme of this book. By weaving together the disparate lives of two sisters, Louisa and Clem, and ultimately ripping Clem from Louisa's life (when Clem kills herself), Glass puts herself in the position to tell us the idea she snaked through the twists and turns of the plot throughout the book.

As Glass's mouthpiece, Louisa experiences a realization on the last page of the book. After battling with grief, she is able to state the theme of the book, loud and clear, in the form of a realization. There are people we hold close, who play the largest roles in our lives, and who we love dearly. But it is only an "illusion. . . that because those people [are] somehow 'ours,' we [are] the ones with the power to hold them. "

I am reminded of a short story by Amy Bloom that both comforts and terrifies me. It is also about two sisters, one of whom has a psychotic break at an age so young she still attends high school. The mother tells the younger, saner daughter that she never has to worry--some people go crazy, and some people just never will, no matter how much they sometimes may want to do just that. As the always-sane observer, I relate to this younger sister in Bloom's story, as well as to Glass's Louisa. This is why I fall so hard into Glass's novels--I can always relate. In Three Junes, her debut novel that won the National Book Award, the main character was Fenno, a homosexual man living in Greenwich Village at the height of the AIDS panic. Were we drowning in surface similarities? Certainly not. But, Glass writes with such an eye and voice for the shared sorrows and pleasures of humanity that it's impossible not to find a bit of yourself somewhere within her carefully crafted lives, and the world--our world, the one world--that surrounds them.