#BookReview ‘You Again’ by Debra Jo Immergut

About the book…

From Edgar Award nominee Debra Jo Immergut, a taut, twisting work of suspense about a woman haunted by her younger self

Abigail Willard first spots her from the back of a New York cab: the spitting image of Abby herself at age twenty-two—right down to the silver platforms and raspberry coat she wore as a young artist with a taste for wildness. But the real Abby is now forty-six and married, with a corporate job and two kids. As the girl vanishes into a rainy night, Abby is left shaken. Was this merely a hallucinatory side effect of working-mom stress? A message of sorts, sent to remind her of passions and dreams tossed aside? Or something more dangerous?

As weeks go by, Abby continues to spot her double around her old New York haunts—and soon, despite her better instincts, Abby finds herself tailing her look-alike. She is dogged by a nagging suspicion that there is a deeper mystery to figure out, one rooted far in her past. All the while, Abby’s life starts to slip from her control: her marriage hits major turbulence, her teenage son drifts into a radical movement that portends a dark coming era. When her elusive double presents her with a dangerous proposition, Abby must decide how much she values the life she’s built, and how deeply she knows herself.

‘You Again’ is an audaciously constructed novel, an unboxing of memory, desire, and regret—and an electrifying portrait of a woman hurtling toward a key crossroads in her life, where a secret lies buried like an undetonated bomb. Many thanks to the ever awesome Sarah from Titan Books for sending me this gifted review copy of this novel, which is out now!

This is the story of a woman meeting herself coming backwards, a phrase often used in daily life to mean you are fighting time, but in this case, Abigail really is.

Her narrative which comes in the form of journal entries puts you deep inside her perspective as she encounters the younger version of herself at a time when her life is poised to implode. She has traded her art in for a safe job in illustration, her relationships with men for the safety of marriage and raising two children. As her older son becomes more socially aware and involved in a antifacist movement, threatening his entire future self, Abigail finds his journey echoed in her own as she examines her repsonsibilities to her younger self. Does she warn herself about where she is headed? Or does she let herself repeat the same steps? And what will be the results if she does?

Contrasted against this are the investiagtions into what are referred to as ‘the incidents of 2016′, which create a sense of tension and apprehension for an event which is both in the past and forthcoming for Abigail and her younger self.

Playing fast and loose with the concepts of self and time, Abigail refinds her passions as she confronts through medicine and analysis what exactly she is experiencing. Past and present collide as the moral imperative raises itself-if you could warn, or stop, or change something by meeting your younger self, would you? Maybe your life is meant to be exactly how it is, whether you like it or not, and your only duty is to live it at its fullest.

I loved the almost magic realism and dream like nature of the plot, where it takes you from being inside Abigails’ conscious mind, to the doctor who is surreptiously trying to analyse her brain imagery and make sense of something her colleagues are disregarding. Abigail feels she is going mad at the same time , it awakens something in her that begins to challenge and overthrow the comfortable cocoon she has constructed around herself, to look at why she has made this a safe space and face headon, events which are deeply buried. And as she does so, her escalating sense of agaitation is reflected in the activities her son is involved in. Both find themselves increasingly out of their depths, and the consequences of chasing enlightenment by being ‘seen’, are not eniterly victim-less…

This is a very different, very insular and thoughtful read which leaves you pondering the meaning behind the facade of what constitutes a life well lived. I finished it, and rushed to download Debra Jo’s first novel,‘Captives’, because of how well she writes, and constructs her female characters. She nails the sense of disatisfaction with doing the done thing, as well as showing how easy it is to fall into a trap you have constructed for yourself.

About the author…

Debra Jo Immergut is the author of the novel The Captives, (June 2018), and Private Property, a short-story collection. She is a MacDowell and Michener fellow and has an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. A magazine editor and journalist, she has also taught writing in libraries, military bases, and prisons. Her work has been published in American Short Fiction, Narrative, and the Russian-language journal Foreign Literature. She lives in western Massachusetts.