Book Highlights - The Hypnotist's Love Story by Liane Moriarty

The Hypnotist's Love Story by Liane Moriarty

Review from Amazon comment by Megan ReadingInTheSunshine

Ellen works as a hypnotherapist and loves her job, she enjoys seeing her clients and helping them. But the one thing that is missing in her life is a man, someone she can love who will love her back. And when she falls in love with Patrick, she feels her life is complete. The only problem is the fact that Patrick has a stalker - his ex, Saskia, but this doesn't faze her in the slightest, in fact, she is intrigued by this. But what Ellen doesn't know is that they've already met and she's been posing as one of Ellen's clients...
It is told from two different perspectives: Ellen's and Saskia's. I particularly liked this as we are able to see things from Sakia's point of view, find out what happened between her and Patrick, how it ended and how she came to be in the position that she is today. We also get a glimpse of Saskia as a person and not as `the stalker' which I found very interesting.
The Hypnotist's Love Story is a complex but very gripping story exploring obsession and love among many other things. There is a lot of suspense and drama, but also well-thought out and developed characters with depth to their personalities and feelings. It is emotional, well-paced

My highlights

She couldn’t control what was about to happen, only her response to it.

Of course, it was to be expected that she thought of them. For a while, each had been the person who knew her best, who spoke to her every single day, who knew where she was at any particular time, who would have sat in the front row at her funeral should she have tragically died. It sometimes seemed so peculiar and wrong to her that you could be that intimate with someone, to go to sleep with them and wake up with them, to do really quite extraordinarily personal things together on a regular basis, and then, suddenly, you don’t even know their telephone number, or where they’re living or working, or what they did today or last week or last year.

You weren’t meant to admit, even to yourself, how badly you wanted love. The man was meant to be the icing, not the cake. She was a bit embarrassed by the depth of her happiness. Thank goodness no one could see the champagne corks popping in her head.

This was the problem with being friends with someone who knew you when you were a teenager. They never quite take you seriously because they always see you as your stupid teenage self.

It had taken a long time for her to reinstall her personality after he’d systematically taken it apart, making her doubt her every thought. He was a selfish, pompous, egocentric, nasty man and yet she had loved him desperately.

He seemed to think collecting luggage was some sort of test of strength and agility, as if he had to crash-tackle his bag the moment it appeared and wrestle it to the ground. It always made me laugh.

From the moment we’re born everyone is hypnotizing us. We are all, to some degree, in a trance. Our clients think we’re ‘putting them to sleep’, but our ultimate goal is the opposite. We’re trying to wake them up.

He’s the star of his own life and I’m the minor character.

Having a baby had been like starting a demanding new job and beginning a passionate love affair and moving to a new country with a different language and culture all at the same time.