the year everything changed, even if it didn’t
what my last innocent year taught me about fantasy, failure, and growing up
It’s always difficult for me to articulate what makes something good. For books though, it has to speak to my soul unforgettably. I need to be able to relate to the main character because I’m always in pursuit of some profound, hidden truth about myself. Perhaps if I read enough pages I can find it. Some would argue that this makes me a poor reader, but I’ve always judged a book by its cover (people included.)
My Last Innocent Year is about a young woman on the brink of her life beginning. She’s graduating college and isn’t sure what she wants out of life. After being sexually assaulted, she begins an affair with a professor that ends how you expect it would. Insert a Jewish background, her socioeconomic status, and an abusive relationship and you got one hell of a coming-of-age story. I feel like society is severely lacking in media about 20-somethings coming of age. I’m 23 and feel even more lost than I did at 18.
The story reminded me a lot of My Dark Vanessa but not as tragic. I saw a few Goodreads reviews that complained that the story lacked an emotional punch, but I don’t necessarily think it needed one. The gut punch was Isabel realizing that this illicit affair was just a small fragment of her life. She wouldn’t be in college forever, she wouldn’t be up under this professor forever; she needed to grow up. By the time I finished, I realized that Isabel never does. She tanks her marriage and her life by cheating on her husband and claims the professor is the cause. In the end, she turned into the worst part of her mother. She becomes the insatiable artist always chasing a fantasy. Someone doesn’t need to be harmed for something to be impactful. I find that fiction that delves underneath the surface to be the kind that sticks with me.
Isabel spends the last chapter reflecting on her life. She spends page after page discussing Connelly and how she wrote to him just for him never to write back. A chapter or two prior, you would think she would have got the message when she realizes she’s not the first student he slept with. He gave the poor girl an eating disorder. Connelly never writes back to her and eventually dies of a heart attack. He also never left his wife either because that’s the person who calls Isabel to deliver the news. In the end, I think the story speaks of the ways something can imprint itself on our hearts but mean virtually nothing to another person. I’m sure Isabel wasn’t the last student this professor slept with.
Isabel ends the story reflecting on all the women and girls she knew and where they were coming from and where they were going. “I raised my voice and called out to her, that faraway version of a girl who no longer existed, not on this earthly plane anyway. I wanted to tell her something, anything, but for the life of me, I couldn’t think what.” I know what I would tell teenage me. I would tell her to try harder to excel and to manage her expectations about her life. I would tell her to be proud of how far she’s come and be excited about where she’s going. I wish Isabel had been a little more excited about her future too. I can appreciate the beauty in “slice of life” type novels and while Isabel is 100% fictional, I hope she learned to take responsibility for her life.
It reminds me of a quote about how we mirror our mothers. They’re everything we could end up being and we’re everything they wanted to be. I rarely purchase books (perks of working at a bookstore), so when I do it’s always something I feel like I need in my library. My Last Innocent Year has earned a comfy spot in a very large box of books under my bed until I can build said library.
Rating: 4/5