Book Review: Still Alive

Reviewed by Erica Ball

The mesmerizing life journey of a woman just trying to find peace

We meet V when she’s seven years old, when a car accident occurs outside of her childhood home and results in a severed head only steps away. V will come back to that time and place throughout her life in Still Alive. Sometimes she’s alone, sometimes with a trusted friend, as she tries to make sense of what occurred that day and all the other days in and around that house.

Always reckoning with the consequences of her formative years, the now adult V experiments with different ways of living: trying out different buildings, neighborhoods, and even cities. She falls in love with different partners, some men, some women, and, ultimately, with her beloved Lex, and they try multiple times to see if now is the time they can make it work. 

Because of her many moves, and, because she has so much to work through, V consistently flashes back to her family’s dysfunction and how that was passed along to her. As such, the narrative jumps from the Portland of her childhood in the 1980s to New York City in the 2010s to the beaches of Los Angeles and onward. 

V is actively rejecting the life so many others seem to want with a wry and sarcastic take on the hypocrisies and phoniness she sees around her. Instead, she is seeking the real, the gritty, and the true. She looks for novel and especially sensory experiences, whether through underground punk shows, time spent in the depths of the woods, or falling head-over-heels in love at first sight. As such, the story contains sometimes graphic moments of violence and many unflinching depictions of lust and sex.

Throughout, V is struggling to figure out how to live in the skin she was born in; how to handle this experience of being alive and all the tedium and joy that comes with it. Poetic and philosophical, she dips into and out of these different lived experiences, at times throwing herself into them, and other times watching society from a distance. Her habit of working temp jobs at important places means she has a front-row seat to some of the rich and powerful and she occupies a liminal space on the periphery of a segment of society that so many attempt to emulate.

V is a fascinating and complex character who doesn’t seek to overly define her relationships or sexuality. With its beautiful prose and applicable commentary, Still Alive has broad appeal. It will be especially effective for fans of coming-of-age stories, underground culture and art communities, bisexual or pan-sexual relationships, and lesbian or sapphic fiction. 

V struggles inwardly and outwardly to come to peace with herself. To do so, she has to grapple with the legacy of dysfunction left to her by her parents and the decisions they made in their own lives. She must deal with the realities of a world that changes relentlessly and that demands she adapt to those changes well, even when it’s concerning the people and places she loves or even her own body.

It’s a coming of age story, and there’s some love in there as well, but in the end, it’s really a story of self-love, a story of craving freedom and finding it within instead of without, and a story of coming home to yourself.

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Thank you for reading Erica Ball’s book review of Still Alive by LJ Pemberton! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.