The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells
By: Andrew Sean Greer
Format/Source: eBook; my purchase
1985. After the death of her beloved twin brother, Felix, and the break up with her long-time lover, Nathan, Greta Wells embarks on a radical psychiatric treatment to alleviate her suffocating depression. But the treatment has unexpected effects, and Greta finds herself transported to the lives she might have had if she’d been born in a different era.
During the course of her treatment, Greta cycles between her own time and her alternate lives in 1918, as a bohemian adulteress, and 1941, as a devoted mother and wife. Separated by time and social mores, Greta’s three lives are achingly similar, fraught with familiar tensions and difficult choices. Each reality has its own losses, its own rewards, and each extracts a different price. And the modern Greta learns that her alternate selves are unpredictable, driven by their own desires and needs.
As her final treatment looms, questions arise. What will happen once each Greta learns how to stay in one of the other worlds? Who will choose to remain in which life?
When the book first came out, I remember pondering and wondering whether or not to pick it up. I decided in the end to hold on it. After hearing that there were plans on adapting it into a movie, I decided to check it out. I wasn’t thinking of it when I decided to read it, but it seemed fitting to read it coming off the heels of reading Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Maybe in Another Life (review).
