You Remind Me of Me begins with a series of separate incidents: In 1977, a little boy is savagely attacked by his mother's pet Doberman; in 1997 another little boy disappears from his grandmother's backyard on a sunny summer morning; in 1966, a pregnant teenager admits herself to a maternity home, with the intention of giving her child up for adoption; in 1991, a young man drifts toward a career as a drug dealer, even as he hopes for something better. With penetrating insight and a deep devotion to his characters, Dan Chaon explores the secret connections that irrevocably link them. In the process he examines questions of identity, fate, and circumstance: Why do we become the people that we become? How do we end up stuck in lives that we never wanted? And can we change the course of what seems inevitable?
In language that is both unflinching and exquisite, Chaon moves deftly between the past and the present in the small-town prairie Midwest and shows us the extraordinary lives of "ordinary" people.
Hannah Grieco is a writer, editor, and teacher.
Adoptee narratives in memoir are fascinating and so important. But in fiction...they're rare. Still a shock when I encounter them! Just reading this passage, seeing myself on the page, felt enormous. From Dan Chaon's "You remind me of me" https://t.co/bOqBBUaW1G
Author of THE LOST QUEEN series (Historical Fiction - Atria - Simon & Schuster).
Unpacking my book treasures & I just came across my copy of YOU REMIND ME OF ME by @Danchaon - one of the kindest & most talented authors I had the pleasure of assisting as a young thing at Random House. Here we are all these years later…(cont..) https://t.co/PkTgKLWnJw
"[A] piercingly poignant tale of fate, chance, and search for redemption."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"One of Dan Chaon's many gifts is his ability to probe deeply and delicately into sorrow. This gift serves him beautifully in You Remind Me of Me, a novel about adoption, about the quiet sadness that lies at the bottom of all his characters' troubles."
--JANE HAMILTON, author of A Map of the World
"Dan Chaon's beautiful, effortless prose commands the reader from sentence one, steering us from prickling unease to wrenching pathos, tunneling inside his characters' minds and worlds with such authority that everything else seems to disappear. It's almost frightening to be in the hands of so gifted a writer."
--JENNIFER EGAN, author of Look at Me and The Invisible Circus
"Beautiful, painful, and sure footed, You Remind Me of Me tracks the delicate connections between a handful of lost and poignant lives, in the process giving them the radiance of a stained-glass window. What a writer. Dan Chaon is going to have a breathtaking literary career."
--PETER STRAUB, author of lost boy lost girl
"Dan Chaon's novel, You Remind Me of Me, is nothing short of brilliant. The novel is haunting me, and I can't stop thinking about it--both as a reader and as a deeply admiring writer. I wish I had a better adjective than superb."
--CAROLINE LEAVITT, author of Girls in Trouble