Name: Rachel's review of All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews
Item: All This Could Be Different
Rating: 5
Author: Rachel

Sarah Thankam Mathews

“All This Could Be Different is an extraordinary novel, spiny and delicate, scathingly funny and wildly moving. Sarah Thankam Mathews is a brilliant writer, one whose every ringing sentence holds both bite and heart.” —Lauren Groff, author of Matrix From a brilliant new voice comes an electrifying novel of a young immigrant building a life for herself—a warm, dazzling, and profound saga of queer love, friendship, work, and precarity in twenty-first century America Graduating into the long maw of an American recession, Sneha is one of the fortunate ones. She’s moved to Milwaukee for an entry-level corporate job that, grueling as it may be, is the key that unlocks every door: she can pick up the tab at dinner with her new friend Tig, get her college buddy Thom hired alongside her, and send money to her parents back in India. She begins dating women—soon developing a burning crush on Marina, a beguiling and beautiful dancer who always seems just out of reach. But before long, trouble arrives. Painful secrets rear their heads; jobs go off the rails; evictions loom. Sneha struggles to be truly close and open with anybody, even as her friendships deepen, even as she throws herself headlong into a dizzying romance with Marina. It’s then that Tig begins to draw up a radical solution to their problems, hoping to save them all. A beautiful and capacious novel rendered in singular, unforgettable prose, All This Could Be Different is a wise, tender, and riveting group portrait of young people forging love and community amidst struggle, and a moving story of one immigrant’s journey to make her home in the world.

A Novel

All This Could Be Different

ayoni

This is my tragedy and my great good fortune, to be the recipient of this bond, to be kept alive under its crushing warmth and weight, obe given it so freely, so much more than I have ever deserved.

The world has ended a thousand times and my name called in each new book of it.

tiff <3

What nobody told me when I was a very young person was that obedience, fearful toeing of every line, chasing every kind of safety, would not save you. What nobody told me growing up was that sometimes your friends do join your family, fusing care, irritation, loyalty, shared history, and affectionate contempt into a tempered love, bright and daily as steel.

I want to not be alone, I mutter into the earth, skin prickling with longing and shame.

Years later I can look back on that moment and see it as the act of devotion it was, to pick up somebody's disgusting mess and dispense with it. The kind of thing my parents would have done for me. That I would do for those I love most. In that moment. though, it felt like someone had lifted my head off, vomited into the urn of my body.

If you cured me of all these, I told her, I don't even know who I would be. It would be like getting lobotomized. I would not recognize myself.

This is what it means, to come here as an immigrant. You are here on sufferance. You are a form of currency, not a person, and only a person has the right to desire, which is to say, to be difficult.

This is what it is like to be hungry: you are on fire, smoke suffusing you, the heat inside impossible to ignore. What it is like to be hungry: time loses meaning, turns elastic and useless, traps you in knots. What it is like to be hungry: like no good thought can stay within you for long.

To return to the new place makes it less new, moves it something closer to comfort, to safety.

All this, the very facts of who I was, could be different. I could be a person refigured: warm, charming, loving, loved.

But nobody consoles you after a rupture with a beloved friend. There are few movies ideal for watching while your tears salt pints of ice cream, no articles in women's magazines that you can skim at the hairdressers You have only the ache. No script to accompany it. No ritual to give it shape.

These were the frames I could choose between, the choices I had.

Sometimes green and blue collapse. Indistinct. Smudge into sameness.

On the door's other side: the woman I wanted, the woman I could not say things to expressly because of that want. The hot water drilled down in mercy. I closed my eyes. Like a child I imagined the world gone dark, everyone vanished, and myself safe.

It made things simple, though. As lies can.

I did not know how to explain this stubborn love for my parents that I staggered under, iridescent and gigantic and veined with a terrible grief, grief for the ways their lives had been compost for my own.

This is what my parents wanted for me, what everybody wanted. To be a dish laid out before a man's hunger. To be taken, to be quiet. Disappear into hair and parts. Disappear, in time, into marriage and mother-hood.

On my phone I read an article about how, in certain cultures, there are no separate words for the color green and the color blue, and if you showed someone a grass-hued paint swatch next to one the color of summer sky, they would say these were the same. Different shades of one thing.

Irdha C

Yolky, jammy, syrupy story. Reminder to live and to try to live well. Good little nuggets of thought that help punctuate such beautiful writing of the mundane.

Rachel

My favorite read this year, so far. It deeply moved me in a way I haven’t experienced in a while. 

Robi

one thing about the found family trope is it’s gonna kick my ass

Kiley Barton

would prob enjoy more as a physical book/ebook

Stas

Naomi 

maggie

almost dnf-ed this bc of how unlikeable the protag was in the first few chapters, but really glad i stuck with it

Hannah

“What nobody told me growing up was that sometimes your friends do join your family, fusing care, irritation, loyalty, shared history, and affectionate contempt into a tempered love, bright and daily as steel”

I love love loved this book, every single character was endearing and compelling, it’s a book about identity in every sense, what the intersections of different parts of us are and how they shape us. It’s lost love it’s chosen families and accepting the love from people who want to give it to you, it’s recovering and learning and loving still. I love the journey of this book and these one liners, as shown above I wrote it down and kept rereading it. It’s queer and bold and full of so much emotion I just AUGH.

my god. someday i will have the words for how this book moved me. 

gabi

many books promise to give a 'true' depiction of what post grad, early 20s, navigation of womanhood is like, aim to give a 'real, flawed' character, and i think this book, while promising none of these things, has given the closest to this vision. this is not on the basis of relatabilty, which i think many can fall into the trap of looking for in stories like these. sneha and i have stories with very little overlap. but she offers such a sense of personhood - the fear to make too much noise, the desire to be seen as useful, the focus on survival that can create a sort of scorn for things deemed almost a privilege to worry about 

'all this could be different' is true to the title; it begs us as the reader to ask - is this all there is? can we truly not imagine another life, another world? and we watch sneha grapple with these same questions. this book makes no effort to establish a narrative that this type of imagination can coincide with individualism - as sneha's community expands and deepens, so does her world. it's a story that serves as a wonderful reminder that we are formed by the connections we make, and the truths we let ourselves live in. 

many books promise to give a 'true' depiction of what post grad, early 20s, navigation of womanhood is like, aim to give a 'real, flawed' character, and i think this book, while promising none of these things, has given the closest to this vision. this is not on the basis of relatabilty, which i think many can fall into the trap of looking for in stories like these. sneha and i have stories with very little overlap. but she offers such a sense of personhood - the fear to make too much noise, the desire to be seen as useful, the focus on survival that can create a sort of scorn for things deemed almost a privilege to worry about 

'all this could be different' is true to the title; it begs us as the reader to ask - is this all there is? can we truly not imagine another life, another world? and we watch sneha grapple with these same questions. this book makes no effort to establish a narrative that this type of imagination can coincide with individualism - as sneha's community expands and deepens, so does her world. it's a story that serves as a wonderful reminder that we are formed by the connections we make, and the truths we let ourselves live in. 

"I knew a certain kind of bombed-out, floodlit peace, the great terror and relief of being known."

i really needed this, at this time: such frank detailing of the want and shame of being alive. loved the prose, esp when describing prickly, tender feelings ("a dark scaled feeling folded around my heart like an eel"), and all the friendships in this novel will be staying with me for a long time, especially thom's ("It means love! I shrieked, and punched him hard in the neck"). lastly, very grateful for how this book sustained me through the daily 50-minute stretches of subway rides this past week; even after long, tiring days, i sank back into the story every time with new energy, curiosity, and hope. 

lina

"I knew a certain kind of bombed-out, floodlit peace, the great terror and relief of being known."

i really needed this, at this time: such frank detailing of the want and shame of being alive. loved the prose, esp when describing prickly, tender feelings ("a dark scaled feeling folded around my heart like an eel"), and all the friendships in this novel will be staying with me for a long time, especially thom's ("It means love! I shrieked, and punched him hard in the neck"). lastly, very grateful for how this book sustained me through the daily 50-minute stretches of subway rides this past week; even after long, tiring days, i sank back into the story every time with new energy, curiosity, and hope. 

Irdha C &
All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews

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Irdha C &All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews

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Irdha C &
All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews