The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley

Penguin Books, 384 pages, $17 (c2020)

Okay, I’ve found my vacation read for this long, hot summer. Not that I went anywhere for a vacation. But I certainly found the book. “The Authenticity Project,” by Clare Pooley, is light but not silly, romantic but not too sappy, snappy but not sarcastic. But it is definitely NOT a mystery.

Imagine yourself a lonely 80-something-year-old man in an upwardly-mobilized part of London. Imagine you are a thirty-something-year-old woman, single, aching to be a mother, who has given up a lucrative job as a lawyer to be the owner of a coffee shop. Imagine you are dissolute man, looking at creeping middle age, with nothing and no one to show for it. What if you all live in the same neighborhood, but you know nothing about each other’s lives. What if that all changed when one day …

Julian, the 80-something, is still depressed, fifteen years after losing his wife. What is there left to live for? What has his life amounted to so far? Julian grabs a notebook and writes in it. He leaves the notebook in the cafe belonging to Monica, the cafe owner whose baby clock is ticking. Monica picks it up and see’s the challenge Julian has left: Tell your authentic story; do not dress it up in the shell you present to the public. One day Monica accepts the challenge and, in turn, leaves the notebook in a bar. It is picked up by Hazard who looks at it through a haze of alcohol and drugs and scoffs at it. 

There is so much more than the individual stories of these characters (and more). It is about community and the family you make from strangers.

This book put me in a happy place. I couldn’t read too many of this type of book in a row but this one was satisfying for here and now. Perhaps you’d like a vacation book — even if you are not going on vacation either — to keep you company.

Picture Ian McKellen as Julian; a slightly younger Kate Winslet as Monica, and a much younger Russell Brand as Hazard. There, now someone can go make the movie.