Books › Girlfriend in a coma
Girlfriend in a coma
First published 1998 · 454 pages
A surreal, pop-culture-soaked meditation on lost youth, spiritual emptiness, and the end of the world.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like waking up from a long, strange dream only to realize reality is even stranger. It begins steeped in the bittersweet nostalgia of late-seventies adolescence, wrapping you in a melancholic haze of lost potential and suburban ennui. But as the decades slip by, the atmosphere shifts from a quiet meditation on grief and arrested development into something deeply surreal and apocalyptic. The prose is sharp and heavily peppered with pop culture, yet it carries an earnest, almost desperate spiritual yearning. It is a steady, existential journey that asks profound questions about what it means to be truly awake. This is a perfect match for readers who appreciate a blend of Gen X cynicism, magical realism, and eschatological dread.
- Mood
- surreal
- existential
- bittersweet
- apocalyptic
- Tone
- wry
- earnest
- melancholic
- philosophical
- nostalgic
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- the passage of time · lost youth · existential dread · spiritual stagnation · the end of the world
- The writing
- Sharp, pop-culture-infused, and deceptively casual, masking a deep well of spiritual yearning.
- The arc
- Moves from a nostalgic, bittersweet mourning of lost youth into a surreal, urgent reckoning with the end of the world.
- Who it's for
- Readers who love 90s slacker angst mixed with profound existential questions and a touch of apocalyptic magical realism.
Content notes
- medical trauma
- grief
- substance abuse
- apocalyptic themes
- suicide
About the book
A New Age novel on a Vancouver woman who falls into a coma which lasts nearly two decades. The novel traces the impact on her family, especially on her boyfriend and a daughter she gave birth to just before the coma. By the author of Life after God.
Description from Open Library.
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