Find Me
By Laura van den Berg
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
In Laura van den Berg’s 2015 debut, Find Me, it is a pandemic that makes our main character stop and re-evaluate the way she’s been living her life.
Joy Jones has not had an easy life – foster homes and tough times, and she numbs the boredom of her grocery store job with a daily cough syrup high. Her past is one that she would like to forget, and the pandemic sweeping the United States comes in handy, as it causes an almost amnesia-like forgetting in a large part of the population, before it possibly kills you.
Find Me: the past lurks
We find Joy in the hospital, simply called Hospital in Find Me‘s weird future, where she is part of a group helping doctors find a cure. She is encouraged to try to remember anything she can about her past, and in doing so is motivated to do some personal exploration into how her life came to suck so much.
As Joy’s journey goes wider geographically and deeper emotionally, you’ll be pulled along with her. Van den Berg nails the small moments, and if you’ve ever had a bit of self-doubt, Find Me is for you.
Available on Kindle.
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