Before She Met Me: an Anatomy of Jealousy

Francesca Laura Cersosimo
13 feb 2016
Tempo di lettura: 2 min

Before She Met Me - Book Cover - UberAura

Before she met me by Julian Barnes is the perfect example of a book you should never give to your partner as a Valentine gift.

Nevertheless, the story is quite engaging, and it explores the dark side of love: jealousy.

Graham is an historian who leaves his wife for Ann, who makes him happy until he discovers about her past as a B movie actress. He becomes fixated on her films and on her past love life and starts descending into obsession.

The novel shows how a sentiment everybody has experienced at least once in their life can basicly ruin your existence. But Barnes' analysis goes further and takes unexpected turn, involving broader themes and topics.

After all, Graham is experiencing his first sexual freedom after a castrating marriage. His fantasies run wild and take hold of reality, altering his perception of it. To him, there is no more difference between the present and the past.

As far as Graham is concerned, the past is something that takes any responsability off his shoulders: It had all been decided for him up there in his brain, without consultation, years ago; decided by sodding history and his background and his parents' choice of one another - by the unprecedented combination of genes they had thrust at him and told him to get on with.

The past is a theme that runs throughout the novel. Ann feels guilty about her past and must rewrite it, in order to hide from her husband an affair she had before their relationship started. By denying this affair, she rewrites her own past and alsto the one of her former lover Jack, a writer. Now, the fact that he is a writer has his own implications. Such decision has an unexpected consequence on him, who relates it to his own work: "I'm always doing it myself. Every time I tell a story it's different. Can't remember how most of them started off any more. Don't know what's true. Don't know where I came from".