Meem's Reviews > From the Land of the Moon

During my preteen years, my best friend began pretending to be a boy named Alex, spinning a story of being from a different religion but willing to convert for me. I never met Alex but we went on to text, on and off, for the next few years. I felt unlovable enough to happily embrace this delusion for a considerable length of time. When she confessed it was her all along, our friendship shattered, leaving me feeling embarrassed and betrayed. It would take me a decade more to see us both for the repressed and fanciful little girls we were, a revelation that lingers in my thoughts.

In my early twenties, I came across "From the Land of the Moon" by Milena Agus. The simple story, where a young woman recounts her grandmother's life (view spoiler)[of arranged marriage, infertility, and solace in a passing romantic encounter with a veteran at a spa, only to unearth a hidden notebook after her death revealing that the affair had been almost entirely fictional (hide spoiler)], struck a chord. I saw myself in the grandmother's struggle, becoming aware of the absurdly thin and rather beautiful line between imagination and madness. It forced me to confront my own delusions, the consequence of a trauma similar to the one which prompted the grandmother's longing for compassion so intensely it drove her to imagine kindness into reality in its absence.

These reflections resurface with greater frequency in my late twenties. Is it any wonder some of my favourite books growing up were stories of unrequited love, such as Love in the Time of Cholera, The Great Gatsby, Great Expectations and most recently White Nights? How many of us must hold onto such functional delusions to survive life?