Beautyland

I heard about this book from my sister and that was good enough to intrigue me… and here we are.
This is the life story of a woman Adina, who, from infancy, thinks she is a human incarnate observer from a far-away alien race. Somehow she communicates with them using a fax machine (which is never explained) and as a child/teenager through her dreams. She sends nightly reports and receives terse responses. Her observations are wry, insightful and very frequently funny. This book tells the entire arc of her life from her birth to her impoverished single mom to her lonely entirely too young departure. I say departure because she seems to think she is leaving earth to connect with her home planet, but the ambiguity of the way the book describes this departure I interpreted it as suicide. But she is very isolated as she can not find true acceptance from anyone except her dog and her best friend and they, unfortunately, both die, The book has some beautifully observed moments but was ultimately pretty melancholy. There are lots of clever, elegantly, I dare say, “poetically” written passages such as, "Her past passions sound tinny when clinking against the jar of time.”