You Can Never Really be Too Careful... ("What I'm Reading Wednesday")

"What I'm Reading Wednesday"...

Imagine, out of the blue, being terrorized and blackmailed by a stranger, claiming to “know what you’d done”… but you, having no memory at all of what the “what” in question actually was. Such is the premise of Mary Torjussen’s chilling psychological suspense, The Girl I Used to Be.

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During a rare night away from her family while attending a conference, (mostly) happily-married businesswoman Gemma Brogan has far too much to drink while dining with a potential client. The next morning, she wakes up in her hotel room—alone, in her underwear—with a savage hangover… and no memory of most of the previous evening. 

Ashamed—and completely unsettled by the whole experience—she returns home to her husband and young son, vowing never to put herself in a similar position again (and to put what little she can remember of that whole weekend out of her mind). 

Someone else has no intention of letting her forget, though… because a month later, a mysterious envelope arrives at her office, with nothing but a photograph inside: an image of Gemma, kissing a man in the shadows of a hotel hallway. 

When she's contacted a second time, she begins wondering just how many photos of her there might be... how compromising they are... and where they might turn up next.

But the terrorizing of Gemma has only just begun…

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The Girl I Used to Be falls in line with the recent crop of psychological-thrillers-with-a-twist (begun a few years ago with Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl), and it does so, mostly skillfully; the twist (which I am not referencing here even obliquely, in order to maintain your surprise) wasn’t immediately obvious, but made sense, once it came out.

I did have a few smallish quibbles, though. There’s rather too much of Gemma internally doing the wailing-and-gnashing-of-teeth bit about what’s happening to her, fretting about her family finding out, etc. (Once or twice through was plenty for me to understand her mindset and grasp how awful it would feel; numerous repetitions of the same thoughts grew slightly tedious.) There’s a scene—the big showdown—which was a wee bit too on-the-nose for my liking. (“Oh. You’re going to go there. Meh.”, was my precise sentiment at the time, I believe.) And, I never could quite work out why Gemma couldn’t stand up to her husband about a seriously out-of-whack situation in their marriage. (I bought that they were a mostly-happy couple, which made the lack of resolution on this One Big Issue that much harder to believe.)

Regardless, The Girl I Used to Be is still a fine psychological suspense… and a modern cautionary tale, to boot. 

~GlamKitty