“It’s a fiction we seem to demand: that a person be substantially the same throughout their lives; human Ships of Theseus each part replaced but in some essential way unchanging. We are less continuous than we pretend. There are jumps, punctuations, sudden reorganizations of selfhood. I’d always had goals, even if they weren’t ones that other people could understand. But, at some point, I’d lost touch with the person who’d set them.”

This was a good final book of the year, a piece of literary fiction that invites readers to reflect on mortality and the passage of time. It’s a fascinating look at a narrator coming to grips with his own main character syndrome. The non-linear storytelling largely dissects the way that Jay reflects on how he can look back on his life experience with the clarity of de-centering himself in the stories of the people closest to him.

If you were a fan of the musical “Rent” and have ever wondered how those characters would have handled COVID Jay is a relatively close estimation.