How to Be Somebody Else by Miranda Pountney review – a constant sense of slippage and precarity | Fiction
Fantasies of walking out of one’s life are always alluring, not least because in reality, they seem at once improbably unrealistic, somewhat shamefully naive and, at bottom, terrifying. We nurture these ideas of stepping out of ourselves in private, aware that they also suggest a certain narcissism; and that they are usually available to those who can choose displacement rather than have it thrust upon them.For Dylan, the 38-year-old Englishwoman who calls time on the New York existence she has built for herself by…