Essentially, two ways exist to portray an apocalyptic story about the world nearly coming to an end for humanity. One can portray the attempt to deal with devastation and keep society glued together from the perspective of the official agencies charged with authority and power. Or, alternatively, one can let the government or whatever remains of a leadership structure do their job in the background while the dramatic lens it pointed at the attempts by average, everyday people to deal with the new normal which is, of course, nothing like the old one.
Of course, some try to have it both ways and usually the result is that neither approach works as well as it could. What is interesting about Life as We Knew It is that all the background stuff about how the government is going about dealing with the situation is very much a part of the narrative and is very much not entirely fictional. Though names are not mentioned, the President is dim bulb from Texas beloved by the broadcasters at Fox News. It does not take a history major to figure out who he is supposed to be. This patina of reality intrudes upon the narrative to lend it a sense of truth at least in the political opinions expressed by the characters in a way that adds to the overall sense of being a story that seems very much like it could happen.
This aspect of storytelling is perhaps the strongest reason why writers should likely avoid going the route of telling an end of the world story about how the guys in power react and instead focusing on the meat and potatoes of the daily life of normal people. This essential quality of telling a story about how average people respond to a horrifically devastation circumstances is encapsulated in just one very significant and recurring piece of imagery. The use of the word “worse.” The story is told journal-entry-style by a teenage girl. She is the type of girl for whom her entry on May 12 is probably replicated in one form or another in the diaries, journals and blogs of millions of teenagers at least once a week:
“I went to bed in a bad moon and today everything just went worse.”
In today’s society, few things are worse than losing a signal on their cell phone or—even worse—the battering dying away from a recharging option. Things are always going from bad to worse that, well, really aren’t that bad and certainly don’t represent the worst that can happen. Later, she will note the “road were even worse than they had been.” Later still, either the mosquito situation is worsening or “people are just more worried about West Nile.” Even later comes a truly bad situation that far outweighs the problematic aspect of losing a cell signal: “I can’t decide which is worse, no electricity or unreliable electricity.”
Life as We Knew It can be accurately be described as an apocalyptic novel or a story about the world possibly coming to an end. It explores themes related to surviving under terrible conditions, testing one’s faith in god and humanity, what is the essential aspect of being human and how much trust should be placed in authority to response to the unexpected. Eventually, however, what the novel proves to be about can be summed up quite succinctly and accurately as being the story of a teenager learning what it really means to complain about things going bad to worse.
