Making It Up

In Making It Up, British author Penelope Lively's self-labeled "anti-memoir" is a collection of eight short stories prompted by actual events that the author herself experienced or was aware of. The stories are derived from the "What If's", or slight alterations of reality that Lively uses to inspire each story. She begins and concludes each story with acknowledgements that explain how the fictional elements were derived, and reveals the story's plausibility by exposing the historical context, real life events, and the people who provide its foundation in reality. By including the explanatory narrative between the stories, Lively openly demonstrates how she works within the context of reality to create fictional tales that might have been real had fate and circumstances been slightly altered. The stories are bound together around the premise that there are pivotal moments in a person's life that could be forever altered by minor decisions or choices that are made: "Somehow, choice and contingency have landed you where you are, as a person that you are, and the whole process seems so precarious that you look back at those climatic moments when things might have gone entirely differently, when life might have spun off in some other direction, and wonder at this apparently arbitrary outcome." (p.37) In The Mozambique Channel, Lively tells the story of Shirley Manners, the nanny who is doomed to tragedy on a ship bound for South Africa with her host family while fleeing the 1942 German invasion of Egypt. In her closing acknowledgements to the story, Lively notes the historical basis of the fiction - the fact that twenty allied ships were sunk by Japanese U-Boats active in the Mozambique Channel during the summer of 1942. She also notes that it was possible that one of the sunken ships might have been carrying British civilians bound for South Africa. By exploring how her own fate may have been changed had her mother chosen a ship headed for South Africa instead of Palestine, she crafts a compelling story of passion, devotion and ultimate tragedy - a story that never happened, but could have. In The Albert Hall and The Temple of Mithras, Lively creates alter egos for herself in the characters of Miranda, the free spirited and impractical mother of Chloe, who becomes almost defiantly pragmatic by contrast; and in Penny Sampson, the disconcerted wife of an esteemed archaeologist. Through the emotions and motivations of these characters, Lively masterfully demonstrates the impact that those closest to us can have on our own lives. In The Battle of Imjin River, she explores how public events intertwine with and affect our private lives, and how her own fate would have changed had her husband fought and died in the battle. In Transatlantic, she invents Carol, an alter-ego who has shed her Englishness and her very identity when she chooses to spend her life across the Atlantic, only to be confronted with the extent of her metamorphosis duri

Lively generalizes the meaning of "confabulation" to include imagining alternative life stories, the road not taken, at various turning points in her life. Surprisingly, in these stories "her" character is never the main character, and represents her only in terms of some biographical facts, not personality. There is a forward and afterword for each story, and this is what I found most interesting. The stories themselves were never dull, but the writing was not particularly inspired. The story which most touched me was "Comet", about the half-sister who died in a plane crash: very romantic. While I have read and enjoyed some of the Lively novels, based on "Making It Up" I am most motivated to read Lively's "A House Unlocked" as it is a mixture of autobiography and social history.

A full life contains millions of choices; some are inconsequential, others have the power to change everything, and sometimes only time and distance show the true impact. In her new book, Penelope Lively examines some of the choices that molded her own life and wonders what would have happened had these choices gone another way. If her mother had chosen to flee Egypt for South Africa instead of Palestine during World War II, would they have survived the trip as so many did not? If she had children at a younger age, married someone else, and pursued a different career, what would have happened? Spanning the years from Word War II to the 1970s, the period of Lively's youth and young adulthood, MAKING IT UP emphasizes the precarious nature of those years, personally and culturally, and how choices made casually colored everything that followed them. The theme of alternative endings and the time period will remind many readers of Ian McEwan's ATONEMENT. A crucial difference is that ATONEMENT's narrator wishes for a different ending for other characters; Lively's exercise is focused entirely on her own choices. Also, she seems happy with the choices she made, giving the stories in MAKING IT UP a sense of averted crises rather than of destinies unfulfilled. However, if this book is lighter and more personal, the reader must be impressed with Lively's gifts as a novelist. It seems like she can make a story out of practically anything that has happened to her. She's so empathetic with her characters; she captures her era so well and draws her readers in so easily that each story is entertaining and meaningful. This is the greatest strength as well as the greatest frustration of MAKING IT UP. The stories feel like the beginnings of novels, but they don't go anywhere and they do not connect with one another. "I should write not one book but hundreds; I should pursue each idiosyncratic path. Not an option, clearly, and to follow a single outcome seemed like a constriction..." But the path is only a path; as it is unchosen, there is no destination. MAKING IT UP is a good companion to Lively's earlier book, THE PHOTOGRAPH, in which a collection of objects in an English country house illustrate early and mid-twentieth century British culture through the stories of how these objects came to reside there. --- Reviewed by Colleen Quinn ([...])

4.5 stars "Somehow, choice and contingency have landed you where you are, as a person that you are, and the whole process seems so precarious that you look back at those climatic moments when things might have gone entirely differently, when life might have spun off in some other direction, and wonder at this apparently arbitrary outcome." so says Penelope Lively as she begins to give us a feel for this new novel. Penelope Lively begins with an introduction to the real circumstances, and ends with an afterward as to the actual outcome. She surmises some directing factor in her childhood that has been constant in her life - that she was programmed to become addicted to reading and writing, to prefer thoughtful, argumentative men and to want children. Unlike her mother who was happy enough to give complete custody to her father during their divorce when Penelope was 12. 'What If' she had made other choices: what if she hadn't escaped from Alexandria at the outbreak of WWII? Penelope Lively's first chapter describes an escape by boat to Capetown as a small child and the resultant changes. 'What If' she had gone to the Arts Ball with an older man dressed in jeans and shirt as a heady rite of passage - but suppose, in those pre-pill days, she had become pregnant, and faced social disgrace as a single mother, or death through a backstreet abortion. 'What If' she was a student on an archaeological dig and didn't believe she would live long because of the threat of the "bomb' in the 1970's. Is this comparable to the threat we feel today of the "bomb"? 'What If" she had not met the Englishman who became her beloved husband, but instead went on to postgraduate school in America and married an American? 'What If', her writing had not been appreciated and her writings had not become novels? Penelope Lively was a lonely child and delved into reading which brought her to her writing. Penelope Lively goes on "When you're making climactic decisions, they do all cluster in younger life. Most of my crucial decisions seem to have been taken before the age of 25," she reflects. "I have always been fascinated by the business of choice and contingency, the way in which we think we make choices but we're directed by contingent events, from the little things like the car that won't start, to the large directives of history. Choice and contingency land you where you are, and the whole process seems so precarious, you look back at those moments when things might have gone entirely differently, when life might have spun off in some other direction." This book is everybody's daydreams made real. What might have been. Not my favorite Penelope Lively novel, but then, 'What If'.. Highly Recommended. prisrob

"This book is fiction. If anything, it is an anti-memoir. My own life serves as a prompt; an exercise in confabulation." Author, Penelope Lively states this in the preface to her new novel, Making It Up, a gorgeously evocative and eloquently written work of fiction that uses the pathways of Lively's own life as a stopping off point, those routes she never took, those twists of fate that never kinked. Have any of us ever wondered "what if?" What if I hadn't got on that plane, or hooked up with person, or taken that job... Penelope Lively imagines what her life would have been like, if during the 2nd World War, as a child, she had left Cairo for Cape Town instead of escaping to Palestine; as a young girl became an archeologist and worked on digs in the English countryside, married an American academic and migrated to New England, or even found that her husband was being posted to the Far East during the Korean War. Through short fictional narratives, complete with a small prologue indicating the route that she really took, Lively weaves a beguiling tale of shipwrecks and plane crashes, family reunions, and violence amidst the heady and giddy battles of war. The eight brief vignettes are made to take quite a heavy weight: a burden of regret, curiosity, anger, and conjecture at the imponderable workings of fate. The stories are all incredibly varied and idiosyncratic, and indeed most could be made into fully-fledged novels. The first story, The Mozambique Channel opens in pre-Alamein Egypt. Shirley is an English nanny living in Cairo who just can't remember England very well. With the Germans advancing, the family she is minding are horded onto a liner bound of Cape Town. While in transit, her first love affair is mired by the death of her six-year-old charge on the torpedoed ship. The Albert Hall tells of a woman called Chloe battling to shake the values of her counterculture mother Miranda, who grew up rebelling against the social mores of the fifties. Chloe is now the sweet voice of reason, whilst Miranda continues to be the force of anarchy. Mother and daughter clash, with Chloe regarding her mother as obviously eccentric but also simply part of life's complexity. Although mildly irritated by her, she sees her as essentially, the crucial directive element in her own struggle for fulfillment. Told from the point of view of Alice, a young apprentice archaeologist, The Temple of Mithras takes place on an early 1970s archaeological dig thrown into crisis by the professor's absconding wife. Alice, who "feels as though she has been born into a generation that will see the end of the world," becomes distracted by the sexual politics of her fellow students. Alice is constantly preoccupied about the threat of nuclear annihilation and talks about "we who love at the end of time." Her conflict comes because she's not particularly interested in archeology, with some basic instinct for self-preservation telling her that this is not for her. "The