Grief in the Age of Smartphones: Book Review of Help! I'm Alive

 

Help! I'm Alive by Gurjinder Basran
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Thank you to ECW and GoodReads for providing the ARC of Help! I’m Alive by Gurjinder Basran, which I received with the expectation of a fair and honest review. Please note: this book and the review include discussions of suicide and self-harm.

As the book begins, Ash is scrolling through his phone, disgusted by the response to his childhood best friend’s suicide. Jay and Ash had not been tight for some time, so in addition to his grief, he feels guilty. The social media viral response to the death--which was posted and later removed--is one of gossipy shock.

Ash’s mother, Pavan, is horrified by Jay’s death, and it brings into clarity the disconnect between herself and Ash and also between her and Ash’s older brother, Anik. She has been a classic lawnmower parent, going before them to clear the path of anything that could be harmful. By removing any struggle, she has created an entirely different struggle for her sons.

Anik, though an adult, has been cloistered in the family’s basement, too wrought with anxiety and depression to leave. A musical prodigy as a child, Anik is now unsure of what to do with his life, the purpose of life in general, what the point of it all is, and has become unable to move under his trepidation.

The final point-of-view we dip into in Help! I’m Alive is Jay’s girlfriend in all but name. Although they never officially declared themselves a couple, Winona was the closest to Jay at the time of his death and feels sucked hollow by guilt, leaving behind only a bitterness that threatens to give a nasty freezer burn to anyone who attempts to get closer. Beneath all of Winona’s pain is the death of her mother, which came long before Jay, and from which she has been unable to heal.

In telling the four different stories, Basran examines not just grief, but also the omnipresence of social media and screens in our lives; how they have changed everything from dating to friendship to how we get the news. Each character gives a reflection and insight into the problematic nature of our online selves. Help! I'm Alive is still about coping with grief and the tsunami of harm caused by suicide, but it is also a commentary on the current ills of our society.

Would I teach this book? Probably not. The internal thoughts and voices of the characters seem much too similar, all of them sounding adolescent in nature and having strikingly similar thoughts about social media. It would have been good to see more difference in the characters' internal monologues. Pavan, especially, seems immature for a grown woman. Ash, Anik, and Winona do not seem out of place, but Pavan, especially for her backstory and the strength it would have taken to overcome it, does not echo that life experience.

The discussion of social media, while timely and in need of examination, does not go as deeply or with as much variation between the characters as would shed new insight to what many of us already notice. Beyond a general disdain mixed with dependence on our phones, the characters do not get much beyond the problematic nature of our relationship to them. In addition, the book uses the suicide as a catalyst to get the characters moving rather than focusing on the internal turmoil caused by the suicide. While this is not necessarily a fault of the book, it complicates teaching a work with such heavy subject matter. Discussion of suicide and self-harm is absolutely necessary, but it should be discussed in the classroom setting in a way that does not bely the gravity and ultimate damage it causes to family, friends, and community.

As an educator and reader, I appreciate that Pavan, as an Indo-Canadian, notes differences in culture and experience, including her mother-in-law’s inability to pronounce her name correctly, without the book being about the conflict of being in two cultures. It would have been nice to see the same treatment of a trans character, who, while being an actual character and not a flat stereotype, still most of her story is about transphobia.

So, while the book has many merits, I would probably not choose to teach it.

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