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Title: What is normal?
Review: I read The Handmaid's Tale for AP lit and loved it. While many people acknowledge how subjective "normal is," this book gives a first hand catharsis of this notion. In Offred’s retrospections of life before, nostalgia reigns. All of us have experienced nostalgia of different stages, or periods, in our lives. It’s really true that change is the only constant. “Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary” (Atwood 34). Change is only startling long after the fact, and it unnerved me how distant yet always present the past can be. Especially with emotions. “But who can remember pain, once it's over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.” Atwood reminds us that memories shape and accompany us in new phases of our life. Which, faster than we realize, become ordinary to us.
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