The Secret Life of Albert Entwhistle by Matt Cain

I struggle a lot with feeling like time is running out. There’s a lot of areas where I feel like I’ve missed out, and won’t be able to catch back up. That’s something that has been a very prevalent theme in my life, especially for the last two years since I had to move back home. No matter how I try to think my way out of it, I worry. 

This was a very directly cutting book to pick up, given that emotional state. This book’s protagonist is Albert, who’s found himself at 64 with very little to show for it. He sticks to the same routine every single day and doesn’t talk to anyone except for his cat. He’s fossilized his life into the last time he was truly happy, when he was a teenager and caught up in first love. A series of upsets leads Albert to realizing just how empty his life is and that he needs to make a change, to invite people into his life.

The book is, fundamentally, a little corny. The core of it is that the only way to let people love you is to be yourself—to let yourself be yourself in front of other people. I still cried nearly every time I opened this book. 

I would call this a coming of age novel, despite the age of the main character. It hit on all the classic themes of finding yourself and growing up. I loved that this book used those themes to center around a character who’s experienced a lifetime of hiding himself away from everyone else, afraid to face his own truth. Despite being less than half of Albert’s age, I related to a lot of the same feelings of loneliness and isolation that he talks about, and have worried that it’s too late to start living my life differently. I liked that the message of this book was that it’s never, actually, too late to be yourself and change anything you want to (or need to) to be happy. 

Inside he felt like he was a whole bundle of fun. ‘Or at least I would be, if I could only work out a way of getting the fun out of me.’