After having enjoyed ‘Benny Rose the Cannibal King’ I was excited to see what Piper would do with an alien story. ‘She Isn’t Herself Tonight’ did not disappoint in the slightest. I’ll go one further and say it was one of my favorite novels this year. Without too much synopsis or jacket copy, here’s what I felt—because yeah, stars or skulls or whatever rating system’s making the rounds doesn’t really say much. If a book’s good it’s because it made you feel something, put you in a different pair of shoes. And Rabbit/Brittney definitely wears some different shoes by the end of this one.
The epigraph says all you need to know, really: ‘For every girl full of love who poured it all into others before learning it will not be returned, and has spent her life since trying to feel full again.’
It’s an alien abduction story, sure, and a story about identity, rebirth, trauma, religion, and self-love, all through the lens of that epigraph, but mostly it’s about feeling like you’re too much, like ‘you don’t know,’ like you’re a one-way street or a doormat. All Rabbit wants is some reciprocity, to be loved for who she is, to be worth chasing and holding down and keeping forever. Great line here about it: ‘Sometimes she felt less like a person, with her own unique memories and impact on the world, and more like a human whiteboard on which other people wrote their desires, assumptions, and disdain.’ And that yearning for reciprocity leads Rabbit into some dark and compromising situations.
She was abducted by aliens at age ten. Again at twenty. But at thirty, with a birthday right around the corner, the Guests still haven’t come back to visit her. The opening chapter covers this pretty quick and puts a hook in you, pulling you through to the very end with some great prose and dialogue and introspection, sometimes breaking your heart, sometimes gritting your teeth, cringing at the desperation, but all the while you’re rooting for one of the saddest characters on Earth to shed her skin and fly into the light.
There’s Leo, Rabbit’s ex who just dumped her recently for being ‘too much work’ after she repeatedly told him the truth about her abductions. Line here: ‘Amazing how a man could be perfectly happy to clean his dog’s shit off the sidewalk but decide his girlfriend of three years was too much work.’ Tyler, the neighbor upstairs on the freaky fifth floor who builds contraptions for a low-key clientele, and who also sees and loves the real Rabbit: huge feet, white hair, buck teeth, antennae and all. Great line from Tyler here: ‘You got the look of somebody who’s been treated like a welcome mat by everybody who ever got to know you well enough to realize they could walk all over you. Well, you’re unlucky streak is over.’
Rabbit’s mother Nora is a constant here, too, gauging her daughter’s worth on how well she can keep a man, and keep up a story about angels she’s been telling for a very long time. Line here: ‘Being a daughter meant sometimes doing whatever might worry your mother most. Even if you never told her about it.’
And then there’s Brittney Smith, Rabbit’s reflection, the brutal truth-telling normie who decides she wants a life of her own. I won’t expand on Brittney, but there’s a chilling scene with her in a church. Line here: ‘There’s the woman in the world and the woman in the reflection.’
The pacing is pitch-perfect; I looked up and was half-way through in a flash. When you get to the ending, slow down a bit, take it all in, and get ready for some bittersweet scenes, all totally worth the read. I highly recommend this book, not only to genre readers but to everyone who believes that ‘to love is to leave a physical crater behind.’
The Strange Outsiders Magazine thing is great as well, and Tyler saying to Rabbit: ‘You don’t want to throw pebbles at the window? Or pretend you’re pregnant?’