My Happy Life, by Lydia Millet

I read this back-to-back with Martin Amis' Other People: A Mystery Story, which was a really interesting, totally unintentional pairing. Both books follow a female protagonist of questionable sanity and wherewithal, who both seem almost emotionally retarded. Terrible, terrible things happen to both of them, repeatedly, but they both maintain an unusually sanguine outlook on things.

In My Happy Life, the narrator is the last inmate in a mental institution scheduled for demolition which has been cleared out. She has been left, forgotten. She tells the story of her life through her meager possessions: a feather, and piece of paper, etc. It's unclear whether her mental malady is congenital or acquired, but it makes her frighteningly naive and amazingly happy, almost no matter what is being done to her.

In Other People: A Mystery Story, the protagonist is a young woman with amnesia caused by some kind of accident. We meet her as she is being released from the hospital, and follow her. Like the character in My Happy Life, she has an emotional numbness and and an amnesia-induced naivete that lead her to truly terrible people who do unspeakable things to her. She begins to figure out who she is later in the story, which was the least interesting part to me.

But, how cool is it to read two books that go together thematically so well? And total chance (and the vagaries of the LA public library hold system) led me to them.

Also, the Amis book goes well with Remainder (which I read in June), as both are amnesia books.