Good morning!! Big news today for all you reading along with The Dirty Book Club! We now have a meeting date/deadline to have the book finished:
January 29th
I’ve already finished the book, and I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed it! I don’t want to reveal too much before the January meeting, but I will say this: the story definitely went a little deeper than I expected. We can get into that a little more another time, but today I want to talk about one of my favorite parts of the book: The Impossible Dream. It got me thinking constantly about my dream house with the hubs, which would probably look something like this…
Spectacular, right?
For those of you who haven’t started reading yet (shame!), you may be wondering where in the heck I am coming from right now. Let me go ahead and backtrack a bit for you…
When Alice bumped her head, she was 39 years old. When she woke, she thought she was still 29. That means she forgot everything about her life from the past decade, including the renovation of her home. Laine Moriarty writes about how when Alice and her husband Nick first bought their home, it was a nightmare. So much work needed to be done, so they made a list together, titling it “The Impossible Dream.” They assumed most of those things on their list wouldn’t get done, but it was their dream home…a fantasy.
When Alice arrived at her home from the hospital, suddenly and inexplicably 39 years old, she couldn’t believe her eyes! The impossible dream had come true! Here’s an excerpt from the book:
There was a solid-looking gold dead bolt, but her fingers instantly found the right key, holding down the door handle and pushing with her shoulder against the door in a practiced, smooth movement. It was extraordinary the way her body knew how to do things—the mobile phone, the makeup, the lock—without her mind remembering her ever having done them before. She was about to comment on this to Elisabeth, but then she saw the hallway and she couldn’t speak. “Okay, listen to me, because I am a visionary,” Nick had said standing in the musty, dark hallway in the first shell-shocked week after they’d moved into the house. (His mother had cried when she saw the house.) “Imagine sunlight flooding through this hallway because of the skylights we’ll put here, here, and here. Imagine all this wallpaper gone and the walls painted something like a pale green. Imagine this carpet gone somewhere far, far away and the floorboards varnished and shiny in the sunlight. Imagine a hall table with flowers and letters on a silver tray, you know, as if they’ve been left there by the butler, and an umbrella stand and a hat stand. Imagine photos of our adorable children lined along the hallway—not those horrible portrait shots—but real photos of them at the beach or whatever or just picking their noses.” Alice had tried to imagine but she was suffering from a bad cold and one nostril was stinging so badly it was making her eyes water and they had two hundred and eleven dollars in the bank and twenty minutes ago they’d just discovered the house needed a new hot water system. All she could say was “We must have been out of our minds,” and Nick’s face had changed and he’d said, desperately, “Please don’t, Alice.” And now here was the hallway exactly as he’d described it: the sunlight, the hall table, the floorboards shining liquid gold. There was even a funny old antique hat stand in the corner covered with straw hats and baseball caps and a few draped beach towels. Alice walked slowly down the hallway, not stopping, only touching things with a vague caressing fingertip. She looked at the framed photos: a fat baby crawling on hands and knees in the grass, gazing huge-eyed up at the camera; a fair-haired toddler laughing uncontrollably next to a little girl in a Spider-Man suit with her hands on her hips; a skinny brown boy in baggy wet board shorts, caught ecstatically midair, bright-blue sky behind him, arms and legs flailing in every direction, droplets of water on the camera lens as he crashed down into unseen water. Every photo was another memory Alice didn’t have. Moriarty, Liane (2011-06-02). What Alice Forgot (pp. 132-133). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.I just loved the impossible dream idea so much, so I decided to create my own list with the hubs. Here are some of the things we fantasize about in our dream house:
My Dream House
{a dramatic entry}
{a cozy fireplace with a custom carved mantle}
{his & hers double marble sinks}
{a vintage claw foot bathtub with crystal chandelier}
{a wine room or cellar}
{a lovely little reading spot}
{french doors to let in lots of light}
{a white kitchen with a huge island and pendant lighting}
{a sparkling pool and an ocean view}
{the pitter patter of little kiddos getting into mischief}
What would your impossible dream house have?
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I just accidentally came across your web site… I think it’s so darling. I love your dream house, though I think you should add a bunch more photos… like master bedroom, massive walk-in closet (that’s a bedroom in itself with an island, etc…
Love this site. What’s the book for April? I’d like to read along…