Life As We Knew It Book Report

Sometimes a drastic change in your life can cause all the people you thought would always be there for you to change. When faced with a huge problem, they may turn against you, or simply disappear. In Susan Beth Pfeffer’s, Life As We Knew It, Miranda keeps a diary during one of the hardest times of her life. The moon is struck off course and comes too close to the Earth, resulting in a massive change in the environment, and in society. Countless horrible disasters occur, such as volcanoes and earthquakes, all things that would seemingly be the largest challenge Miranda would have to face. But throughout the book the main source of Miranda’s problems seem to be coming from things that seem like nothing compared to the scale of how horrific this event is, and the cost it has had on her. The obvious problems are the ones that hit her, but it’s the subtle ones that make her snap, piece by piece. If the people you love change at a time of suffering, it adds to the destruction, showing that when a huge thing goes wrong, so do all the little things. The first thing to break is the relationship between Miranda and her mother. The relationship between a mother and a daughter is a delicate one. Though, as a boy, I do not know this as a fact, it seems as if it is always a battleground between these two. Though the world may be ending, it doesn’t change the heartache that comes along with Miranda and her mom’s serious and frequent fights. Her mother can change Miranda’s mood with just a few words, and with how unstable Miranda is to begin with, the words can just hurt so much more than they used to. For example, at one point Miranda is in town and finds soldiers handing out a limited amount of food. She runs to her boyfriend’s house and brings him back, spending ten minutes doing so. They manage to get the last rations, but Miranda’s Mom gets very mad at her, and yells at her for putting the food at risk by going to get her boyfriend. “Mom makes it sound like that’s something bad,” Miranda complains, “like I can’t have friends anymore, like family is the only thing that matters from now on. If that’s how the world’s supposed to be, I hope it does end soon. I hate Mom for making me feel this way. I hate Mom for making me feel that for every good day, there have to be 10 or 20 or 100 bad ones. I hate Mom for not trusting me. I hate Mom for making me feel even more scared. I hate Mom for making me hate her. I hate her.” These moods, these rants can take up pages at a time, with a whole change in the feeling of her writing, the way she views life. Miranda is trying to grasp at the strings of her old life, the life this major event has destroyed, but Miranda herself is being torn apart by the only things she has, the strings. And the more she pulls and pulls and pulls the farther she unravels, as does her relationship with her mother. Food is one of the things they argue about. “ ‘I skipped brunch,’ I said. ‘I forgot about it.’ ‘You don’t forget about food,’ she said. ‘You fasted yesterday. Today you eat. Those are the rules.’ ‘You sure do like making up the rules.’ I said. ‘You think I like this?’ Mom yelled. ‘You think I like seeing my children go hungry? You think I’m getting any pleasure from all this?’ ” After this set of dialogue Miranda runs off to her room, leaving her mother alone. This is one of the few scenes where you see the mother open up and show weakness and depression. Of course Miranda regrets running away, but their relationship is so precarious that either the fight continues or it disintegrates with Miranda running away, resulting in silence for days. Of course, there is no running away from the moon, but Miranda can always run away from the problems that take an emotional toll on her. But maybe that isn’t always a good thing. A stable relationship with her mom is hard for Miranda to maintain in such troubling times, and can bash and batter her until she can withstand no more. Sometimes a major event won’t only trigger a break in an already faulty relationship. Such a giant change may tear apart the ones that had never been broken before, or maybe those that had never been there to begin with. As the immediate problem of the moon grows and grows, Miranda finds it more difficult to feel the same for those around her than she used to. With her mom times were already tough to begin with, but with her father, their relationship had always been based on simple emotions. Unlike the fights she had with her mom, the anger she feels towards her father is only channeled through her thoughts. It’s the small things that nobody in the book really talks about that set her off, the exact opposite of what happens with her mother. Her Father is the only problem in the book that she doesn’t have to run away from, because he’s already run away. Miranda spends two months worrying about her father, only to be satisfied when his wife, Linda, and he spend a couple days with her. “Jonny asked, ‘Are we going to die?’ Mom and Dad exchanged looks. ‘Not in the immediate future,’ Matt said. ‘We have food and fuel. We’ll be okay.’” ‘But what happens when the food runs out?’ Jonny asked. ‘Excuse me,’ Lisa said. ‘I don't like to discuss this.’ She got up and left the room. Dad looked torn. Finally he got up and went after her. So we were back to us, the us I've gotten used to the past couple of months.” Although all the Dad is doing is leaving the dining table, it symbolizes his leaving the family, leaving Miranda for his new chosen life. Miranda is too overcome with the joy of him being present to mention anything, let alone to get into a fight. But the thought, the feelings, are all still there. A relationship between two people needs to be maintained through a steady set of interaction, especially one so vital, such as the one between a daughter and a father. Miranda’s father is so distant, that it feels as if there is no relationship to begin with, just the remains of what was there. Even before the moon ruined the earth their relationship was too distant. But as major events change what was familiar to a distant memory, and create a terrifying reality, we look for those we love. Miranda needs her father in such a time as this one, and, of course, he isn’t there. He was never there to begin with, but then she was just mad that he wasn’t. As was stated earlier, their relationship had always been based off of very simplistic emotions, those of anger for leaving her, and love for being her father. Now the emotions are so much more complicated than before, with complete abandonment, almost disappointment in her father for leaving. There seems to be a sort a peace she’s reached, presumably due to how long her father’s been gone. Anger seems almost like the better outcome than being at peace with her father’s absence. In times of trouble, we grasp for the people we think will be there to reach out and take our hand. With her mother she got a fight, a smack on the hand. With her father, there just wasn’t anyone there to take it. In conclusion, it seems as if something that poorly impacts your life in one way, will end up hurting you in another way, some sort of unexpected way. “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions”-Hamlet One cannot expect a major event, good or bad, to bring only one outcome. The possibilities of what will hurt and what will heal are endless. Life is not a word, but a novel. One that never ends and only grows and twists and turns and speeds up and slows down until you can’t make heads or tales of it. There are pieces of it that we love, that we read over and over again, but if that page is ripped out, then the novel isn’t complete anymore. If those we all thought would be there for us suddenly change, and are not as we thought they were, that can hurt more than possibly imaginable.