Release Date: April 29th, 2020
Genre(s): Memoir
Publisher: Independent
Pages: 345
Rating: 
.25
Note: I recieved an e-copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
This Book is the Longest Sentence Ever Written and then Published is an experimental memoir by Dave Cowen. It explores his life, mental health and bipolar disorder, and the grief and loss of his father. But unlike other memoirs, this book features a stream of conscious narration and is one sentence long. Throughout This Book is the Longest Sentence Ever Written and then Published, Cowen also discusses other experimental works, past iterations of the longest sentence ever written, and more.
When the author reached out to me about this book, my first thought was the last sentence in Ulysses (which I shamefully have not read yet) that is several pages long. And to my surprise, Ulysses was mentioned on the very first page (and throughout the memoir). I find myself very interested in books like these that go outside the box. And as I found out from this memoir, there are several books that are written similarly.
Even if this book had more than one sentence, a stream of conscious narration is something that I almost never see in memoirs. There was something about reading Cowen’s thoughts as they were that brought a different kind of insight to his life than a standard memoir would have. And while I don’t have bipolar disorder myself, as someone who has Seasonal Affective Disorder, there were certain times where I could see myself where Cowen was describing the ‘highs’ of bipolar disorder, and where his thought process sounded very much like my own. It takes a lot of opening up to write a memoir, but even moreso to write your thoughts word-to-word as they come, and I don’t think I’ve ever had exposure to someone’s thought process on this level. I think part of the reason for this is that writers are usually reflecting on events that are happening in the past. But in Cowen’s case, he is primarily discussing mental health and grief, which are two things that are very current and so he is able to share his thoughts and emotions more clearly.
With this type of writing comes with a lot of different topics. And while the memoir mainly covers mental health and grief, there is so much more that is covered, ranging from the Enneagram to Kanye West to spirituality. And while I was much more interested in the most prominent events in Cowen’s life, I found that these smaller topics give readers a lot of insight into a person without exploring the bigger things.
As a part of his writing process, Cowen mentions in the book that he would not going back to edit the content that he already wrote. This was done in order to preserve his thought process and keep it as genuine as possible. However, I do wish there were some other forms of editing with this book. While the author uses a lot of punctuation (other than periods, obviously) to make the flow of his sentence sound more like internal dialogue, I do think more grammatical edits would have helped overall. There are some instances with capitalization and punctuation that I felt could have been altered to help guide the reader as the subject matter changed. Writing one sentence obviously means that you have to bend the rules a bit, but I do think creating grammatical rules can give words even more power in this case.
But overall, reading This Book is the Longest Sentence Ever Written and then Published has been a pretty one-of-a-kind reading experience. I felt like this experimental memoir shows an interesting way of looking at a person’s life, and as I know now, there’s lots of books out there that break the norm similar to this. Perhaps soon I will finally pick up Ulysses – after all, I have already read a sentence much longer.
