The Time Traveler's Wife

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have participated in the latest round of the Barren Bitches Brigade Book Tour. I opted in because I heard alot of good things about this book and was anxious to read it. Each participant has been asked to select three questions from a list and answer them. Below is my review and my answers. Hop along to another stop on this blog tour by visiting the main list here

Spoiler Alert
If you want to read this book but haven't yet, you may want to avoid reading this post.

So on to my review. In a nutshell: This book bugged me. I was excited to read it since it had the sci-fi time traveling thing going on as well as the fact that it was supposed to be a grand love story. Everyone was tellingl me that they read it over and over, and how they cried every time. I gotta tell ya, I just didn't see it. I thought it was a dark depressing story, with desperation as it's main theme. Henry DeTamble was a reckless human being, not only with his own life, but with the life of his wife and future child. Clare Abshire is a lost soul. She starts out that way before she meets Henry, and when he arrives on the scene she is desperate for the attention she couldn't get elsewhere. . Besides the fact that his visits start to border on the inappropriate, his tales of their wonderful future have Clare enraptured. She focuses on nothing else and misses out on a normal childhood and early adulthood...convinced by Henry that their fate is already sealed. Their "real" life together is snippets of sex surrounded by dark periods of oppresive waiting. It's hard to figure out if Clare is really in love or just unnaturally dependent on Henry. The more time she spends with him, the more depressed she becomes. At the end, she is even more lost than she was when she began.

The chapters about infertility are heart wrenching, and I suppose one could argue that they accurately reflect the horrible pain, suffering and desperation that many women go through. As my answers below will indicate, I feel that Clare's intentions are selfish, so much so that she disregards the health of her babies, and they die as they time travel out of her womb. I have a hard time believing that any woman would be that desperate (and stupid).

I don't expect to be in the majority with my views. I know that many people liked it, and if you got something good out of this book, that's great. It was certainly a well crafted story, just not my cup of tea. If you want some serious romantic time traveling story about a woman who can't conceive, go read Outlander. Now that's my cup of tea with milk and honey! (For another fulfilling albeit cheesy experience, go rent Lake House).

Clare endures a lot trying to create a child. She keeps trying, regardless of the fact that she continuously miscarries, continuously wakes up covered in blood, and knows that her child could have the same "problem" as her husband. What drove her to continue down this road and why do you think Henry participated?

Clare was so desperate to have a piece of Henry with her always, that she stopped at nothing to get it. Because Henry came into her life so early and so often, Clare knew nothing else but him. Her whole world revolved around him; her days were either spent with him, or pining away for him until he returned. So it’s no surprise that Clare says “I wanted someone to love who would stay: stay and be there, always. And I wanted Henry to be in this child, so that when he was gone he wouldn’t be entirely gone, there would be a bit of him with me…insurance, in case of fire, flood, act of God.” Which funny enough, she does end up needing in the end. I suppose Henry participated at the time because at that particular moment he hadn’t really known for sure if they could or could not produce a baby. Although he does say “I know, without knowing, that this is very unlikely”. I believe that Clare couldn’t think rationally, or even objectively…so obsessed was she with having Henry, even if it was just a small tie to him. If mothering were her only objective, she could have adopted. But when Henry suggests it she says “But that would be fake. It would be pretending.” Maybe it was at this point that I really started to hate this book.

The present and future intersect frequently in the book. Often the result of these minglings is that information about the future is hinted at or revealed early but the actual experiences cannot be altered or prevented. If you could have known about the struggles you'd face on your path to parenthood, would you have wanted to know? Would you go back and warn or prepare yourself, even though you'd be powerless to change the outcome? Why or why not?

If I couldn’t change the outcome, then I wouldn’t want to know. I remember sitting in my RE’s office after the first failed cycle, having a real conversation after we finished with all the medical talk. I was saying that if someone could just tell me, “Look, this is never going to work so stop wasting your time”, I would have stopped in a heartbeat and went on to adoption. But as we all know, the siren song of IVF is strong. Each new cycle I thought “THIS is the time it’s going to work!”. But eventually we realized that it never would. So, even if I thought I could prepare myself for that awful journey, I don’t think I would have believed myself. I would have tried to change the outcome anyway. Clare is clearly very happy when she learns that eventually she has a baby, although she doesn’t know how many tries it will take. She has one further miscarriage, and there is no discussion of how she felt through it, so it’s unclear if was easier for her to bear than the others. No miscarriage is of course, but perhaps that glimmer of hope gave her the strength to try again.

Due to his ability to time travel and jumps into the future, Henry knows that he is going to die. Yet in the beginning, he works hard to try to create a baby with his wife. This situation obviously benefits Henry in that he gets to parent Alba for a bit before he dies. This situation also benefits Clare since she wants to be a mother. Yet Alba grows up without her father yet with his extraordinary abilities—abilities that were a difficult adjustment for Henry growing up. Do you think he acted in the best interests of his child when he helped create her knowing that he would not be around to help her understand her ability to time travel? Do you think it is truly possible to take the feelings of a child in mind prior to creation as well as fulfill your own need to parent? If you had been in Henry's shoes, would you have created this child knowing she would be able to time travel and you would not be there to help her understand this anomaly?

Throughout this whole story, I couldn’t help but think that Henry was hiding behind his “fate” theory, and engineering all these events out of pure selfishness. Or if not selfishness, his desperation to stay grounded in the present. To begin with, I don’t think he acted in the best interests of Clare. I think he could have withheld his identify from her when he came to her as a young girl. He didn’t have to supply her with the list of dates that caused her to spend her life waiting for their next encounter and essentially stealing her childhood. It was as if he were cementing his future by binding her to him from the very beginning. Although he gets a vasectomy, a time traveling self gets her pregnant anyway. Knowing what he is, and what could happen, he does it anyway. I think it is a necessity to take the feelings (and health!) of a child in mind prior to creation. Your desire to parent a biological child should never supercede their welfare. Even worse if you know you won’t be around to help them.