Online, everyone's lives look happy and perfect, which makes Clare Pooley's charmed novel, The Authenticity Project, a fresh, welcome and necessary change of pace. Her uplifting story considers what happens when a person tells the truth about the soulful realities of life.
The story opens with Monica, a single, 37-year-old Brit. The former corporate lawyer--who gave up her career to open a London café--discovers a simple exercise book left behind in her coffee shop, with three words etched on the cover: "The Authenticity Project." The first page reads: "How well do you know the people who live near you? How well do they know you...? Everyone lies about their lives. What would happen if you shared the truth instead? The one thing that defines you, that makes everything else about you fall into place? Not on the internet, but with those real people around you?"
Intrigued, Monica learns the book was initiated by 79-year-old Julian Jessop, who committed his truth to its pages, using the written word as a form of catharsis--a "comfort, like loosening the laces on... uncomfortable shoes," allowing one's feet to "breathe a bit more easily." Julian expresses the deep-seated loneliness he's experienced for five years since the loss of his wife, Mary, whom he appreciated only once she was gone. Julian created the Authenticity Project to purge his own feelings and deliberately left the book with his story behind, hoping that whoever read his entry would be inspired to share their own truth in its pages and then leave the book for others to do the same.
When Monica searches for Julian online, she discovers he is a famous portrait painter "who had enjoyed a flurry of notoriety in the sixties and seventies," and he lives just a few blocks away from the café. While Monica drafts her own entry in the book (admitting she is "a bit of a control freak" and how she wants "a baby. And a husband. Perhaps a dog and a Volvo, too. The whole, stereotypical nuclear family thing"), she devises a plan to flush out Julian, to combat his loneliness. She wants him to teach an art class at her café.
In the meantime, Monica leaves the notebook, with her entry added, in a local wine bar. The book lands with a cocaine addict, Hazard, who takes it with him as he sobers up on a remote island in the South China Sea. What ensues is a story of how the notebook travels from person to person, its pages filling up with heartfelt, moving messages that connect six strangers who come clean about their lives. They ultimately discover each other and form bonds of commonality, friendship and love.
Truth and kindness establish a sense of unexpected community in Pooley's (The Sober Diaries) entertainingly clever, well-drawn story that offers a sense of hope and respite for people struggling through life in a troubled world. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines
Shelf Talker: A notebook created for the purpose of confessing intimate, personal truth turns British strangers into friends as they form an unlikely bond of trust.