The Journey for truth and Avoiding Self Destruction (The Impostor's Daughter)

           The Journey for truth and Avoiding Self Destruction

              Reading Laurie Sandell’s The Impostor’s Daughter was an interesting experience because of the way it was formatted. There were several places throughout the story where I was confused as to where it was going and I thought that she had lost the thread of the story. But every time she brought it back and with greater focus and understanding. I felt this most with Ben and her interviews. I wondered at times why so much attention was paid to Ben when this was a story about her father. It seemed that he was not all that important to her. But then I realized that it was a chronical for her abuse of Ambien and how she was an imposter of sorts in her relationship with Ben, and everything made sense to me. And although I still feel a similar way about the interviews, lots of name dropping, that too had a bigger picture, because that that led her to meet the person that would light the way towards her road to recovery. That too had a point.

            Back to the framing, I really appreciated the book end that Sandell created. I fully believe that it was successful because of the form that is graphic memoir. I love the last panel of the book and how it is a picture of the handwritten get it out of your system writing that later became the first panel. That really seemed to put everything together for me. Talk about great opening lines “Whenever my father went out of town, he had the mail stopped. It didn’t matter if he was gone for one, two or ten days—if my father wasn’t home, the mail didn’t come.” That just pulls the reader in.

            The pacing of this memoir was interesting because it seemed to speed through childhood. Most of the stories we have read spend a lot of time in those early days that shaped us. Sandell really didn’t which fits because that who part was in part a lie. I thought it was very interesting to spend so much time with an adult narrator. But that too made sense because it is almost like her adult life up until the time she goes into recovery is her “childhood.”

            Something else I really appreciated about this book was the way it dealt with time. When Sandell lets the reader know how bad her Ambien abuse really had gotten, falling asleep in the bathtub twice, I was taken aback. This moment is really powerful, and it was made so by when it was revealed. Had that information come out as it happened it would have the revelation feeling to it. This book is about the reveling of information the hiding of it, truth and lies. Sandell spends much of the book searching for who her father really is and we as readers are on that journey with her. When we find out that she was holding back on us too, not letting us know how bad she was doing. we feel cheated and lied too. this allows us to further identify with her struggle to discover her father. We also see what her search for him, for the truth has cost her. That moment for me was the most griping emotionally. In those few pages she did what her father was never able to do, face herself.

            I feel like I should spend some time talking about the reliability of the narrator in this book. Because of the way Sandell laid out the Ambien use super slowly at first and then openly but without saying it what it was it made me trust her. It felt like she was giving me bits and pieces of the story and it was up to me to come up with it. This again made me feel a part of the journey. I felt this most when during the brief conversations between her and the PI, and when she received letters from people. There was so much more there that I wanted to know. But that wasn’t the point of the book to a certain degree. The point of the book was about the cost of searching for the truth and what happens when you find it and how you live with yourself and the people around you.