Girlfriend in a Coma

Not for me at this time...

The first radio dramatisation of an iconic modern classic by Douglas Coupland, author of Generation X and Microserf, brought to the airwaves by Sony nominated Dan Rebellato.

December 15 1979. Karen Ann McNeill goes into a deep coma after a teen party. She remains under until 1997. When she wakes up, the voices in her head keep telling her the world is about to end, but Karen doesn't believe them...

Jared ..... Florian Hutter
Karen ..... Rayisa Kondracki
Wendy ..... Maggie Blake
Richard ..... Jason Durran
Hamilton ..... Simon Lee Phillips
Pamela ..... Heather Dann
Doctor ..... Peter Marinker
Megan ..... Julia Summer
Gloria ..... Buffy Davis

With original music composed by Alice Trueman
Broadcast on:
BBC Radio 3, 8:00pm Sunday 23rd May

Life changing. This book revealed to me the magic of life

For a slim book, I should have read this relatively quickly, but I just didn't engage with the story that much and kept picking it up, then putting it back down again. The first half starts off great; it's tense and tragic as Karen's friends and family come to terms with the fact that she's in a coma and the doctors don't know if she'll ever come out of it. On top of that, they find out she's pregnant as well! But the story begins to delve into fantasy a bit too much for my liking and becomes very unrealistic and silly towards the end. Disappointing.

Again, this was a book that was a solid tweener between three and four stars, but because it's Douglas Coupland, he gets the benefit of the doubt. I bought this book a LOOOOONG time ago and thought I had read it before, but I think it's one of those books I never got around to because the only thing familiar to me was Coupland's style.

Once again I'm having problems with the goodreads rating system. After just having given The Stars My Destination 3 stars, I felt as if I needed to give Girlfriend in a Coma a better rating than Stars because I definitely liked it more, buuuut don't really believe 4 stars is accurate. It shouldn't be so close to my favorites... (east of eden, The Fountainhead) But, 5 stars is what we have so I'll have to make do! If there were half stars, I'd go that route. I'd say this book is at a 3.5.

I guess I would say that this is an uncomplicated book about complicated things. You follow the lives of 6 friends who have been friends since hs. One of them falls into a coma. Which isn't even the actual thing that changes the lives of the other friends. Nothing changes their lives, and I guess that's the point. They are like I think 99% of the world. Getting by. Surviving. Rather than existing for joy. The comatose friend (Karen) serves as a way that somebody can see who they are as an adult thru the eyes of the person they were at 18. When the world was your oyster, and you were still full of hopes and dreams and naive but lovely world views. The book is really about life. It's about a lot of things actually. About the feeling you get as you get older, the feeling of disappointment. Of coming up short. Like life is never quite as good as you always imagined it would be when you were younger. (Why is it that it seems that age and experience rob us of our faith and hope?) It's about fulfillment and the lack thereof. It's about curiosity and the need for it, the need as humans to ask questions, to ask why and how about everything and anything. It's about fairly typical stuff. Friends getting older and going through trials, making mistakes and then making them again. The way you feel cheated when life doesn't turn out to be as great/grand as you thought it would be. About sitting around and realizing everything as gone to shit and you're worn out and tired on the inside. Replacing real life with work, and technology. IT's about all that crap. We've all felt it in some way or another. And that I guess is the part about the book I like...it touches on something very real. But it also feels kinda preachy to me. Karen comes back from a coma and it's a miracle! But she still has the mind of her 17 yr old self and therefor views her friends and their lives with the mind of her 17 year old self. She starts having premonitions, and soon enough they come true and the world "ends." Everybody just lays down and goes to sleep save these 6 friends, and one daughter. (who is also pregnant) So the world has gone to shit, people are decomposing all over the place, toxic chemicals and gases released into the air making weather horribly unpredictable and volatile. Jared, a friend who killed off early in on the story comes back and serves as a guide, not unlike The Christmas Carol. In fact, it's pretty much the same thing except instead of seeing what the world would be like if they were dead, it's the other way around. It's the opposite of the Christmas Carol. So basically it turns into Jared leading them around and healing them in different ways, answering their moody angsty questions and then eventually letting them come back to the real world but informing them they will forever afterward be doomed to forever searching for the meaning of life. They will no longer conform, but instead will need to be a beacon. They will need to show people that there is more, and that they should never settle. Always reach, always try, always seek answers, always have hope. And don't get me wrong, all this is great. These are great topics, and very real topics and I felt moved on many occasions. But like I said before, to me it felt borderline cheesy. I would guess that Coupland has a tendency towards the dramatic, the moody... the contemplative, the spacey. It felt... just depressive. Ya life is hard, and ya we don't always find fulfillment in everything we do but there ARE good things in life. Even amongst 60 hour work weeks, and bills and mind numbing jobs and text messages and emails and the internet, even amongst all that interminable bullshit, people find real joy all the time. There is real joy in small moments and Coupland sort of dehumanizes our generation. I think we deserve maybe just a lil more credit than that!! Come on. Give us a break.

But there were a lot of quotey moments. You know how sometimes authors seem like they're writing that way on purpose? Like they're just looking for little lines that sound cute and pretty or depressive in a pretty way? You know so people could put it on the top of memes, or people can write it down in their quote book, orrrrr teens full of angst can quote it to one another? That's what this book seemed like. But that doesn't mean I didn't dig some of the quotes...

" I didn't realize then that so much of being an adult is reconciling ourselves with the awkwardness and strangeness of our own feelings. Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience."
(How true is that by the way? And does it ever stop being true, truly?)

"Imagine you're a 40 year old, Richard, and someone suddenly comes up to you saying Hi, I'd like you to meet Kevin. Kevin is 18 and will be making all of your career decisions for you."
(another true statement. How many of you at 25,30,40,45, don't look back and wish there's SOMETHING you could've done differently? Count yourself lucky if there's only SOME things, and not MOST things, or even worse... everything.)

"We were so young then that we didn't even understand what unhappiness could be."
oh, life. How you teach us the meaning of pain.

and my personal favorite.... :
"It's not up for debate. We lost. Machines won."


I think overall I would say that people should pick up the book and judge themselves. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't my favorite but I'm a firm believer that books mean different things to people at different times so you never know. It was good enough, I wouldn't tell someone not to read it. So pick it up and decide for yourself.

I'm nothing if not predictable, so of course I absolutely loved this ridiculous romp through a post apocalyptic dystopia that resulted in a swooping lesson of morality, littered with references to The Smiths along the way. This year I have discovered that I simply love Douglas Coupland - the merging of the giddy and grandiose with the crisp and profound is just so deliciously silly and enjoyable to me. YUM !!

The first Coupland I've read and I loved everything about it except for the ending. The character of Jared added much necessary humour and I fear I may have developed a slight crush on him! Terrible! The embedding of Smiths lyrics and song references was a lot of fun. I've given this a five star rating because while the optimistic didacticism at the end, as the group of 'failures' are sent from there post apocalyptic lethargy to a life of questioning and challenging, was a bit of an anti climax, the concept of Karen's coma and the feeling of kinship it encouraged in her friends give the narrative a warmth that kept me reading.

What a predictable happy ending ... It really spoiled the impression. Although I'm still thinking that the book is pretty good. Moreover, several quotes are amazing (and all of them are about death, so i dont know why such things are more believable, but THEY ARE and i've just saved some of them on my phone, lol).