Girlfriend In A Coma

Douglas Coupland
1998

Have you ever watched a Judd Apatow movie? Or a Quintin Tarantino film? They create these alternate universes for their characters. If you have not seen any of Judd Apatows films please watch: The 40 Year Old Virgin, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Knocked Up, I love you Man and This is 40. These movies in particular from the Apatow Vault can chart the love and marriage of Paul Rudd and Leslie Man, both exceedingly funny comedians.

I am a fan of alternate universes in pop culture films and books and because of that I love Douglas Couplands work. If you lived in the Douglas Coupland universe you would experience and apocalypse or the threat of an apocalypse at every turn. But do not confuse this apocalypse for the zombie-ridden adrenaline filled apocalypses of our dreams. Douglas Couplands apocalypses involve the dry dry heat of an atomic bomb and the bright bright light as your life and lies are burnt into your corneas. “And any small moments of intense, flaring beauty such as this morning's will be utterly forgotten, dissolved by time like a super-8 film left out in the rain, without sound, and quickly replaced by thousands of silently growing trees.” (Generation X). Douglas Coupland loves the prospect of an apocalypse, not the threat, the prospect.

In the Douglas Coupland Universe, if you were to loose your job and your character was in the "parent" roll, you would loose it at the age in which you should have been retiring however due to our current consumer driven materialistic world you wouldn’t be able to retire and would be forced to return to the job market, on the hunt, for a job you no longer want and are no longer relevant to. If this happens you will be instructed by your wife that she will:

a) Not be making you lunch

And you will:

b) Not be coming grocery shopping

I find these to be excellent rules and will incorporate them into raising my future imaginary children.

These rules will also apply to any and all children that may or may not have to move in after loosing their jobs as well.

Have you thought about your own mortality today? How the world will continue on with out you. Do you believe in God but look at the world around you and wonder if maybe he just doesn’t really like us? Have you spent time thinking about the burning dry heat of an atomic bomb? How you might be grocery shopping, have it be a sunny clear day. So sunny that you a feel it all the way in the crevices of your brain, bleaching the inside of your skull bright and holy white. How you will see a flash and a whoosh and a dry dry heat. No?

Well you need to pick up a Douglas Coupland book immediately. It doesn’t even matter which book. Any of them, all of them will satisfy this need.

I first read Douglas Couplands book "Girlfriend in a Coma" at the tender age of 16, and I fell in love. I fell in love with a book years before I would know what falling in love with a human being would feel like and I think Douglas would approve of that.

Girlfriend in a Coma involves a girl, who is dating a boy and falls into a Coma. The end.

Just Kidding.

The book, written with a youth perspective that includes an omnipresent narrator, chronicles a teenage girl who in the process of starving herself for an upcoming vacation accidentally sees a prediction of the end of the world. In an attempt to avoid the end of the world she slips into a coma. Right after loosing her virginity. You guessed it; she’s also knocked up.

Her boyfriend and baby daddy never really grows up; this can be extended to her group of friends as well. Girl wakes up from coma, world ends. They survive. Sacrifice themselves and the world returns to continue as always.

While the plot itself seems strange it was the language and dialogue that I fell in love with, with quotes like "At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are?" or “One of my own stray childhood fears had been to wonder what a whale might feel like had it been born and bred in captivity, then released into the wild–into its ancestral sea–its limited world instantly blowing up when cast into the unknowable depths, seeing strange fish and tasting new waters, not even having a concept of depth, not knowing the language of any whale pods it might meet. It was my fear of a world that would expand suddenly, violently, and without rules or laws: bubbles and seaweed and storms and frightening volumes of dark blue that never end.” And also “I didn’t realize then that so much of being an adult is reconciling ourselves with the awkwardness and strangeness of our own feelings. Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience”; how could, I a youth coming of age, not resist this book that had answers to questions I had never even considered and questions I am still trying to find the answers to.  

Reviewed by: Lorenda!