Alone With You in the Ether
Ratings81
Average rating3.9
15
Ratings81
Average rating3.9
From Olivie Blake, the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six, comes a literary, intimate study of time, space, and the nature of love. Alone with You in the Ether explores what it means to be unwell, and how to face the fractures of yourself and still love as if you're not broken.
CHICAGO, SOMETIME—
Two people meet in the Art Institute by chance. Prior to their encounter, he is a doctoral student who manages his destructive thoughts with compulsive calculations about time travel; she is a bipolar counterfeit artist, undergoing court-ordered psychotherapy. By the end of the story, these things will still be true. But this is not a story about endings.
For Regan, people are predictable and tedious, including and perhaps especially herself. She copes with the dreariness of existence by living impulsively, imagining a new, alternate timeline being created in the wake of every rash decision.
To Aldo, the world feels disturbingly chaotic. He gets through his days by erecting a wall of routine: a backbeat of rules and formulas that keep him going. Without them, the entire framework of his existence would collapse.
For Regan and Aldo, life has been a matter of resigning themselves to the blueprints of inevitability—until the two meet. Could six conversations with a stranger be the variable that shakes up the entire simulation?
Reviews with the most likes.
I have a lot of conflicting thoughts about this book but mann the endnotes got me. What happens when your broken brain becomes someone else's problem. I was rooting for them in all their awful-coexisting-toxic-mess and I think I was rooting for myself too.
one of those books you finish and want to read it again immediately
being rational this was a 4⭐️ read, i feel like the writing loses itself sometimes. however. it made me feel 5⭐️ feelings so it is a 5⭐️ book bitch
The trouble with this book for me was that because of the hype that this book has my expectations were high and this book didn't live up to them. Yeah, the prose is pretty but it is also tedious. This book wants to be a deeply philosophical love story and some scenes were really moving especially during the first part of the book but what was more prevalent than these true moments of beauty were the moments when both the main characters's thoughts were not intriguing at all. There were entire paragraphs that I wanted to skip. At around the 90 per cent mark, I wanted to DNF it because there was a scene after a fight that goes like this
“She wanted to stab him and stab herself and stab her mother and especially to stab Marc; she couldn't stop the images of herself, stabbing and stabbing and stabbing until her hands were soaked with tears and blood. She would do all of it, she thought, and then use the carnage to paint something new, something brilliant, and with Aldo's blood especially— from the vessels of his lovely wounds—she would paint a sky mixed with gold, dotted with constellations.”
like yes let's ignore this very obvious sign of her deteriorating mental health because love. bah! gimme a break.
but hey this book has about 10000 5-star reviews so it works for some people! might work for you hence 3 stars
I do not know how I feel about this book. Part of me wants to give it a 1, and the other part wants to give it a 5. I'm not going to rate it.
As a person who currently lives unmedicated and with bipolar disorder, this book did an excellent job of allowing the reader to inhabit that space. I really felt brought a lot with Regan's moments, which I think is invaluable in a book about mental illness.
But also because of that experience, I found the relationship with Aldo to be problematic and codependent. It felt like something really unhealthy being broadcast as something desireable or “sweet.” I can't in good faith rate that well.
I also don't think I'd recommend this book to anyone, unless they really want to know what it's like to live with BPD. there are no big takeaways other than an excellent depiction of that.
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