This is Michael Maxwell with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.
Today, I am recommending Do You Remember Being Born? A Novel by Sean Michaels.
Many of us have some base level of anxiety regarding artificial intelligence. It doesn’t necessarily make me happier to know that somewhere there could be a program analyzing the words I’m saying right now and how I say them in an effort to mimic my humanity. That’s the kind of baggage many readers will bring to Do You Remember Being Born- a novel about a poet tasked with writing a long poem in collaboration with a spiffy new AI named “Charlotte”.
Our poet protagonist, Marian Ffarmer, is a narrator that readers of books like A Man Called Ove and Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine will quickly fall in love with. Marian is a national treasure who is indomitable in her own quirky way as she walks confidently amongst tech bros and PR mavens while wearing her signature tricorn hat and cape.
Why would Marian agree to do this? Is she selling out, or is this part of some larger redemption arc? As more is revealed about Marian’s life, readers come to ascertain her motivations- even as they begin to change over the course of the story. Charlotte, the AI collaborator, lives in a yellow room which I am willing to bet is a reference to Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her disturbing classic story The Yellow Wallpaper.
Michaels’ novel, which reveals the extent to which AI has impacted its creation only in the few pages of its afterward at the end of the book, offers no pat answers and does not attempt didactic nonfiction-in- disguise. Rather, this is an example of how some of the best novels invite readers to chew on questions they have about the real world whilst they escape within the fantasy world that the author has created for us.
Check out Do You Remember Being Born? A Novel by Sean Michaels and other stories about humans and technology at the Sioux City Public Library today!