Finished reading The Girl Most Likely by Rebecca Sparrow in three days. Should be possible to finish the whole thing in one sitting, but I was trying to kill time on the train.Story of Rachel Hill who went from the girl most likely to succeed at 17 to a babysitting bum at 27. She had it all - primary school tunnel ball champion, St. Peters prefect, Honours degree graduate, and travel magazine Features Editor. All that's left is for her to find a partner, and life will be perfect and complete. Or so she thought. One drunken night at Las Vegas, she and her boyfriend of three years Troy was married by a minister in an Elvis costume. She quit her job at the magazine; getting ready for the big move to America. Months later, Troy got cold feet, left a message on her answering machine asked for a divorce. Everything went downhill from there.
With the help of some friends - Zoe, lesbian erotic fiction (pr0n) writer; Matt, the perfect boy-next-door; and Alex, her haughty Grade Two alaga - she realizes the importance of living the life you want to live, and slowly gets her life back on track. Even though it's bordering on chick lit, I quite like the book - if only for the Aussie and 80's references I don't quite get and the little nuggets of insights like these:"Every time I won an award or notched up some great achievement I thought I was securing my place at the top of the line. Where the amazing people are ..... But now that I'm here, loitering around the finishing line, I wish someone had defined exactly what "all" was. A big salary? A good-looking spouse? A baby? Why does the definition of "having it all" revolve around things you acquire, rather than the way you feel about yourself?" Which reminds me of this line from Tyler Durden: "The things that you own, they end up owning you."
More: "I thought that marriage was the one piece I didn't have and that once I slotted it in with the others, had the box set, the champagne would pop and the bells would ring and happiness would arrive in the mail alongside my credit card bill. But it doesn't work that way. And in that scenario, there's no mention of the joy to be found in eating cupcakes with a six-year-old. Or tending to a garden and coaxing an orchid into bloom. Or writing truly bad erotic fiction that you think is a masterpiece."
And this: "People say that perfection doesn't exist. But it does. And achieving a perfect-looking life isn't that hard. Perfection breezes in on a whim for all of us and stays for a few hours, a day or two. Those moments when everything is just right. Perfect. The problem is that we convince ourselves that we can only be happy when perfection is around. And when it does show up, we expect it to stay. Unpack. Put up its feet and make itself at home. But it can't. Never does. And instead perfection drifts out when we are unpacking the groceries. Or reading the paper. And we haven't noticed that it's gone, until it's too late ..... So we wait. Wait for perfection to call and let us know when it will be back. In the meantime, we move the pictures and rugs around, covering up those foundational cracks when they begin to appear. And they always appear. Eventually."
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