Part coming-of-age story, part romance, part family drama, the novel Still Alive by LJ Pemberton spans its untethered narrator’s life across cities, times, and tenses. 

A young creative, V—short for Virginia, a fittingly American name given her cross-country travels—moves from her childhood home in Oregon to New York and then Los Angeles. Yet she returns again and again, emotionally and physically, to the suburban Portland house of her upbringing, a place prone to damage: “Fender benders were to be expected. Our wood-paneled ranch sat at the intersection of a five-way stop with three stop signs and two blind pullouts.” 

Mostly, V returns to the resonant unhappiness of her childhood. She recalls thinking, as a little girl, “Someday I would leave and be able to have a home that felt full of whatever I wanted […] I just had to stay alive long enough to get there.” But when, as an adult, V revisits her childhood’s good moments, they only make reconciliation with her traumatic upbringing more challenging. 

There is her emotionally unavailable father, her stoned, selfish brother, and most importantly, her mother: a central figure across the novel’s disparate moments in time and space. Susan abandons the family midway through V’s childhood. And once gone, Susan slips further and further into depression, involvements with bad men, alcoholism, and eventually drug addiction. 

While V is in college, Susan coerces her into forking over the money she’d saved for travel. “I was on summer break and working at Best Buy to save money for a hoped-for week in Europe,” V reports. “It didn’t happen.” Instead of getting V to Europe, the money goes to Susan’s rent, drinking, and who knows what else. All we know is that Susan spends it quickly. The event awakens V to the reality of her parents’ distinct individualities: “Together, my mother and father had seemed so middle class, so sitcom-solid. On her own, my mother was precarious.” 

The novel’s other central character is Lex—V’s lover, girlfriend, ex-girlfriend, obsession, destroyer, savior. V describes her as “this soft butch” with “a shaved head and mexibrows I could spend three decades figuring out.” After meeting at a basement punk show on Portland’s East Side, they date on and off for years. The scope and trajectory of their messy love affair is compelling. Pemberton captures the shape of their journey blow-by-blow, mirroring the way relationships play out in life. 

Pemberton’s achievement in character work extends far beyond Lex and V. Just as thickly drawn are V’s father, brother, and mother. Her best friend, Leroy, a singular character enmeshed in life, is devoid of ambition and is “as close to a wizard as a real person can be.” 

A number of scenes deserve mention, but one in particular, saved for a late chapter, splits the narrator, and the reader, wide open. V is a child and playing with dolls in her bedroom during one of her mother’s intense depressive spells. Unlike other times, Susan approaches V, asks to play with her. “She came in and sat cross-legged in her jeans, next to the scene I had set up,” V remembers. The moment is a resonant one in which excitement, empathy, and confusion come through simultaneously. “It felt weird and exciting,” she confesses, “to show mom what I liked doing.” V also feels the extent of her mother’s suffering. “I didn’t know why she, or I, should be so sad, but she made me want to cry.” 

At its best, this novel reveals the deep truths of its subjects. With an onslaught of small insights, moments, and fleeting feelings, Pemberton conveys the layered wholeness of her characters—never directly, but via accumulation. 

Of dating Lex: “We were like a goddamn American Apparel ad without the pedophilic gaze […] grotesque and beautiful and deeply in debt.” 

Of smoking cigars: “I smell like leather ottomans and British libraries and gray-haired men in smoking jackets.” 

Of a life in Florida: “I could flirt with skin cancer, cultivate an opinion about rum.” 

Of Portland liberals: “This bunch of craft beer stand-for-nothings.” 

These passages are visceral, evocative, and insightful. Months and years of V’s life whiz by in mere paragraphs filled with pithy lines that crackle but do not always penetrate. But when Pemberton—not often enough—settles into a moment, the depth of feeling conveyed is impressive. 

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LJ Pemberton’s essays, poetry, and award-winning stories have been featured in The Baffler, The Los Angeles Review, The Brooklyn Rail, VICE, and elsewhere. Previously an assistant editor at NOON, she currently reviews fiction for Publishers Weekly.

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JP Cavender is a writer and reader in Los Angeles. He is working on his debut novel, and his work has appeared in The Drift.