Like, I just re-read Th e Age of Innocence and I think because I’d never studied it in school I’d never thought about the circumstances of the writing of the book. Because it felt too irrelevant, and then when I did end up going back to it, I was really thinking of the idea that when you write a book, you are automatically presuming that there is going to be a future when the book is read, a future where people aren’t necessarily going to be associating the book with the world during the time of its publication or the time when it was written. It’s not what happened, I didn’t give the money back.
Through it all, Gould's insights into what makes up the sometimes barely perceptible beats of our lives are sensitive and spot-on - as is her perfect description of what it's like to have sex in a too-close-to-the-ceiling loft bed. Gould follows Laura over more than a dozen years, as Laura puts aside one version of herself, sees her future being lived by her best friend, and struggles with raising her daughter, Marie, who goes from being a malleable, if messy baby, into being a possibly messier teenager, with unrealised dreams of her own. Laura's life gets redirected multiple times, though, by the kind of huge events that range from being universally catastrophic (the September 11th terrorist attacks), to personally devastating (the untimely death of a loved one), to mundane, yet totally transformative (motherhood). So, of course, Laura becomes a waitress, navigating the streets of the East Village, performing for the patrons of a handful of small cafes, and hooking up with another young aspiring musician, Dylan.
It opens on Laura, a young woman in her 20s, who has come to New York City in the early 2000s, to live with her best friend, Callie, and make a career as a musician. Perfect Tunes has many of those big before-and-after moments and many of those rippling after-effects it shows the ways in which we are all, always, having to reimagine the story of our lives.
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