If I were fortunate enough to live to be 100, I would want my exciting life saved for posterity. Wouldn’t everyone? If so, “My Little Blue Dress” is the prime example to follow if you want to write your memoirs in, say, 80 or so years from now.

Despite the misleading title, “My Little Blue Dress” is the memoirs of a female centenarian, but not just any ol’ lady of 100, for the narrator is born on the first of January 1900, making her exactly 100 on the first day of the new millennium.

Born in rural England, the narrator brings the reader through each decade of the 1900s with a new story — she spends the ’20s in France as an artist with a lesbian roommate named Elo‹se, and the ’30s as a nanny in England.

In the 1940s, the narrator works for the war effort in a creative think tank, and in the 1950s she moves to American to live the typical suburban lifestyle.

The narrator interrupts her story, however, after she gets through World War II. She begins to incorporate her present life with her memoirs, making the book both a diary and a reflection on the past.

It is in her diary that we meet Bruno Maddox, uncoincidentally the name of the author, who cares for the narrator after he moves into the apartment next to hers.

Once her present-day diary starts, the memoirs and reflections become more and more sparse, and much of the remaining novel is dedicated to the quirky and sweetly insane Bruno. T

he reader finds that Bruno has “caregiver’s syndrome,” a mental disorder of those who spend a great deal of their time caring for someone completely dependent upon them.

Bruno struggles with this disease, which incapacitates him socially, and the almost omniscient narrator pieces together his life outside of her contact with him through strange visions, brilliant detective work, and overheard telephone conversations.

As the book progresses, the fact that something fishy is going on becomes more and more apparent, and the twist ending of the book reveals the truth about the entire novel.

Maddox has created a refreshing and self-deprecating fictional debut in “My Little Blue Dress.”

It is evident from the start that the memoirs are completely disingenuous, as the narrator describes too many anachronisms to list.

Because of this I found myself a bit disoriented at first, though admittedly I was amused by the author’s sarcastic style and the narrator’s storytelling abilities.

When the obviously fabricated memoirs are put to the side to narrate Bruno Maddox’s life, the book really picks up: I finished the rest of the book practically in one sitting.

Maddox (as author) is simultaneously self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating through the voice of the elderly narrator, making the portrait of the author very quizzical indeed as his psychological conflict comes to the fore.

I found it very difficult to distinguish where the voice of the narrator ended and that of the author began. However, this fact seems to matter less and less as the story unfolds.

Failed attempts at dating and meeting friends hound the author, and the reader is meant to felt pity for Bruno because of his unfortunate situation and supposed mental disorder.

Though Bruno is pitiful, he steps over the line into the unlikable at times, and I felt frustrated with his continual failures and his pathetic excuses.

Maddox has a fresh, funny and very unpredictable style: he will be perfunctorily plodding through a description and right in the middle of the paragraph slap the reader in the face with a witty and hilarious line.

In fact, the entire novel is highly unpredictable. I never knew what was happening or where it was going until the very last few pages, which didn’t seem to matter at all.