You Remind Me of Me - (Ballantine Reader's Circle) by Dan Chaon (Paperback)

About the Book

Three disparate lives of a fragmented family struggling with poverty, depression, and dysfunction are viewed through memories and secret pain in this poignant tale of fate, chance, and the search for redemption.

Book Synopsis

A "delicately hypnotic [and] haunting" (The New York Times) novel that weaves together the lives of four very different characters to explore identity, fate, and the ties that bind, from the award-winning author of Among the Missing

"Remarkable . . . You Remind Me of Me succeeds because it makes us feel its characters' pain and inhabit a world in which desperate measures often seem like the only ones available."--The Washington Post Book World

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, Cleveland Plain Dealer

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.

Review Quotes

"Delicately hypnotic . . . haunting . . . Chaon writes with a deep, dreamy evocativeness. . . . A lovely, insinuating book."--The New York Times

"Beautifully disquieting . . . This novel, his first, has elements of Stephen King's Cujo, Alice Munro's Friend of My Youth and Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face all at the same time. . . . Emotionally complex and disturbing . . . Chaon's achievement . . . is to rescue his characters from oblivion and make their lives seem as real as our own."--The New York Times Book Review

"In You Remind Me of Me, [Chaon] proves once again he's a writer worth watching."--USA Today

"Chaon's remarkable first novel . . . is not only satisfying but devastating; a portrait of a Midwestern middle class struggling against the particular realities of a failed ideal, redefining family in a culture of absent and adoptive parents. . . . In the end, Chaon provides his characters a commodity they seem unable to acquire for themselves: grace."--Entertainment Weekly (Editor's Choice)

"[A] remarkable first novel . . . It is a tribute to Chaon's considerable gifts that the truth, when it comes, deepens as many mysteries within the novel as it solves. . . . His vivid, unadorned prose . . . manages at once to be precise and dreamlike. . . . The book succeeds because it makes us feel its characters' pain and inhabit a world in which desperate measures often seem like the only ones available."--The Washington Post Book World

"Pitch-perfect . . . Dan Chaon's meticulous and insightful novel You Remind Me of Me is such an important achievement. . . . It is fundamentally a tale of identity sought, borrowed, rejected, and then reborn."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Chaon's extraordinary first novel . . . renews my faith in the unique capacity of literature to help us understand and ultimately respect ourselves and the strange, baffling, complex figures we all can be."--Houston Chronicle

"Chaon deftly reveals the quiet suffering of ordinary people in a way that can be uncomfortably realistic but is always compelling."--People

"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 A Visit from the Goon Squad

"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

"Don Chaon . . . has quietly emerged as one of the best stylists in American fiction."--Ruminator Review

About the Author

Dan Chaon is the acclaimed author of Fitting Ends and Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award, which was also listed as one of the ten best books of the year by the American Library Association, Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, and Entertainment Weekly, as well as being cited as a New York Times Notable Book. Chaon's fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and won both Pushcart and O. Henry awards. Chaon teaches at Oberlin College and lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, with his wife and two sons.