Nina and Maura are a 30-year old lesbian couple who have lived together for 2 years. Nina is the cautious type while Maura is the free-spirited type. Maura only has 10 more years to live, while Nina has at least 40. However, this doesn’t scare Nina off, and she ends up proposing to Maura. Nina decided that it was better to still live her life with the person she truly loves (even if it’s only for a short while) and make unforgetting memories instead of being sad and lonely.
Claire had the opposite reaction to seeing Ben’s short string. They had been dating for the past 2 years, but she couldn’t bear the thought of going into marriage knowing that the “til death do us part” would come much sooner than desired. So she leaves him.
Ben and Maura join the same support group for short-stringers who have around 10 years left to live. The group meets on weeknights at an elementary school. During one session, each attendee was asked to write a reflection. Ben dropped his paper, and the teacher (Amie, Nina’s younger sister) found it, read it, and wrote a response to it. From there on, a pen-pal relationship formed between “A” and “B”. Eventually, they meet in person and piece together that they were each other’s pen pal. Amie falls in love with Ben, but she initially doubts if she’s willing to commit to a short-stringer. She refuses to look at her own string, but she knows that if it’s long and they decide to have kids, then she is going to have to take care of them alone on a teacher’s meager salary. Ultimately, she decides to take the risk and marry Ben, and they have 2 kids together. Ben gets diagnosed with an illness, so he prepares his will, but then he and Amie die in a fatal car crash on the way back from one of his doctor’s appointments. So their string was the same length, and had Amie known that her string was also short, it may have prevented them from having kids in the first place. Because Maura also died around this time, Nina becomes the caretaker of Amie’s two kids.
Meanwhile, Hank was a surgeon who only had a year left to live when the boxes arrived, and he joined Maura’s and Ben’s support group instead of the group meant for those who only had months left to live because that group seemed too depressing. He ultimately died taking a bullet for a presidential candidate when someone tried to assassinate him. Even after death, because he was an organ donor, he saved a girl who was in need of a lung transplant. So other people had long strings because of him.
Jack and Javi became best friends in military training. When the government issued a requirement that you must have a long string in order to fight, they switched strings. Jack only had enlisted in the first place because he came from a history of war heroes and was pressured to become one himself, but Javi was the one who passionately wanted to defend his country. Because Jack had a long string and Javi had a short string, Jack got to leave the army and Javi got to have an impactful life by being promoted to captain and saving Americans until he eventually was shot and died (exposing the fraud). Jack was open about the switch and wrote a book to commemorate the life of his best friend.
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Are the lengths of strings vs people’s choices like the chicken-or-the-egg conundrum?
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A couple who was married just before the boxes arrived discovered that the wife’s string was short while the husband’s was long. So, they tried to go out together by jumping off a bridge. The wife died on the spot but the husband survived. Was the wife’s string short because she had seen that it was short?
“If a doctor had to choose between saving a patient who was eight or seventy-eight, they would save the child first, right? Maybe this was the same? Help the long-stringer first? // …Did a patient receive less care because her string was short, or was a patient’s string short because she received less care? // It felt like the world’s most f*****-up version of the chicken-or-the-egg conundrum” (66).
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What are the benefits to seeing string length?
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If you’re about to undergo a risky surgery but you have a long string, you and your family don’t need to worry so much.
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If you have a short string (due to dying from a sudden car crash), you can “live it up” for the rest of your time by traveling to Europe and cheating on your diet
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What are the disadvantages to seeing string length?
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Couples that would have stayed together and made great memories together broke up.
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Short stringers are denied job training, loans, insurance, etc (since they aren’t seen to have a good return on investment).
“The American people should elect the person whose values they agree with, whose positions they support, and whose proposals they believe will improve our nation. Having a short string does not erase those qualities, and choosing not to elect a qualified candidate does not erase those qualities, and choosing not to elect a qualified candidate simply because of their short string is akin to punishing them for something entirely out of their control. We’ve made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, gender, disability, and age, but forcing candidates to show their strings would be condoning an entirely new category of discrimination. //… Some of our greatest leaders died while in office… and some of our least effective politicians have been blessed with longevity. If John F. Kennedy had revealed his string, and the voters punished him for it, the Cuban Missile Crisis might have erupted into nuclear war with the Soviets. If Franklin Roosevelt had revealed his string, and the voters had punished him for it, the Nazis may never have seen defeat. And if Abraham Lincoln had shown his string, then the men and women who look like me and my children might still be enslaved, and our country might have been torn apart for good. I shudder at the thought of what our world would look like today if those men had been denied the chance to govern simply because of the unfortunate hand they had been dealt” (122-123).
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Is a short string “worse”?
Even if someone has a long string, they can still deal with paralysis, be in a coma, have PTSD, lose a limb, etc. And they may not have as much lasting impact (like Hank and Javi had by saving lives). So quality is ultimately the most important measure.
“We can’t go back. But at least we can go anywhere else” (208).
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Book club discussion points:
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When Nina and Maura went to Italy, the culture there was different. Not many people looked at their strings because they already knew that their priorities are family, passion, and love, and since many are devout Catholics, they believe that God will call them when it’s their time. However, in America, many people prioritize work and will only splurge on vacation if they knew they had a short string.
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It was cute how Ben and Amie got to meet in real life.
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It was crazy how everything was connected (so we even got to meet the person who received Hank’s lung donation).
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It was confusing on why many short stringers seemingly attacked out of no good reason (i.e., shootings at hospitals, bombs, etc.). Don’t they have better ways to spend their last moments?
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How would the story be different if people got a string when they were born instead of at the age of 22? What if they got it when they were 50 and having a mid-life crisis?
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Because this was a “Read with Jenna” pick, there was an author interview. One thing that the author said was that she hoped that people took away the fact that people can measure their life by different measures (not just length).