Uncertain Lives by Joram Piatigorsky

A thought-provoking novel of ideas about biography, authenticity, identity, and secrets

“Uncertainty is the engine that keeps us going.”

Beginning with a disastrous birthday party, Uncertain Lives tracks the decades-old friendship of two septuagenarian women—Devra, a renowned scientist, and Allison, a society journalist. 

When Allison, whom Devra nicknames Angela, offers the promise of writing Devra’s biography as a birthday gift, the party devolves into a fight about the comparative merits of such a biography, which Devra is decidedly against. 

Soon after, Devra contracts an illness and Angela begins visiting her regularly. The question of biography resurfaces when Angela discovers a trove of Devra’s unpublished writings—pages crowded with arrows, cross-outs, and marginal reflections on her life. Reading them privately and aloud with Devra leads to meditations on memory, friendship, identity, and the line between truth and fiction as Angela wrestles to understand who her friend really is.

“Hearing Marion call me Alison was jarring, although Alison is my name—Alison Mellows—but Devra has always called me Angela. I admit, I like it. Even others call me Angela when there. Devra’s presence has magnetic power. I’m plain old Alison when she’s not around.”

A jam-packed novel of ideas, the book uses Devra’s writing to explore everything from childhood sexual assaults to musings on octopus brains, the role of uncertainty in life, and the question of whether we are singular individuals or merely collections of shattered identities. Moving through the first-person voice of Allison, who herself is fractured by the name that Devra gives her, the book traces both how a life is constructed from the inside, through Devra’s diaristic writing, and how it becomes interpreted and understood by another in the eyes of Allison. The result is a novel that asks the big questions about how we construct reality—and whether we can ever claim to know it fully.

“I close my eyes in disbelief. My god. I think. Is that Devra’s revenge, if I can call it that? Is her world entirely within her imagination?”

That thematic boldness is reinforced by the novel’s structural play. Allison’s time with Devra and her writing slowly takes shape as an experimental biography within the novel: Devra Denniston: A Life Imagined. 

Playing with the sense of verisimilitude, tracking both the life as the individual experiences it, as her friend writes about it, and then again as the biography itself is received by the public creates a self-reflexive experimentation within the book itself. What is true and what isn’t true? Uncertain Lives throws every fact into doubt—most explicitly by airing Devra’s unproven theories about her own family and the circumstances of her life. 

“By being a composite of individuals, it was impossible to know the ‘real’ Devra, because no such single person existed, at least not in her mind.”

While these philosophical flourishes are fascinating, the book gives less emphasis when tracking the actual, present day relationship between Devra and Allison. As septuagenarians, questions arise and go unexplored about the various tensions that exist between them. While these come to the fore in heated moments, such as when Devra calls Allison’s journalism gossip, they do not get the full treatment that would allow lifelong friendship to expand on the page. 

“It was impossible to record an inner voice. She had no way beyond believing herself to verify that her inner voice, a separate inhabitant, rescued her.”

Elsewhere, the novel stumbles on the sentence level. Dialogue, in particular, can feel stiff, expository, and does not give a sense of organic conversation or character voice. This bleeds over into abrupt changes of pace, when outbursts arise unnaturally or context-setting telephone conversations run longer than necessary with extra verbal ticks. The result is a rhythm that alternates between hurried plot revelations, extended intellectual rumination, and expositional passages, occasionally disrupting narrative momentum.

An intriguing novel that merges philosophy and science of the human brain with questions of how we honor our friends, Uncertain Lives is ultimately the story of two friends getting to the bottom of who they really are.