Off the Beat

Always out of sync somehow

Ina is fifteen and everything in her life seems to be out of sync: School is mediocre, she hates her body, her parents’ marriage is just a façade and her love life is a mess.

When Ina falls in love with Phil, the boy from big, promising Berlin she feels beautiful, self-determined and free for the first time.
But fear of loss soon interferes with the moments of carefree happiness and so Ina experiences her first time not with Phil, but as a one-night stand. She observes the increasingly escalating conflict between her parents with a mixture of strange indifference and sensationalism.

Not infrequently, Ina’s life often seems like a production, a film in which she is the only one who doesn’t know her role. Sometimes a spectator, sometimes the leading actress.

Between the longing for affirmation and the urge for independence, she feels like she is treading water – a life in an endless holding pattern, in which the beat before the downbeat never comes. Only when she breaks free from all expectations does she find herself in the present.

Embedded in a plot set in the summer of the 90s, Alexandra Helmig tells an intense coming-of-age story with all the insecurities, self-doubt and longings of a growing girl. The short, staccato-like verses draw the reader directly into the stream of thought of the young protagonist and reflect – sometimes impassively laconically, then again breathlessly and highly emotionally – her emotional turmoil. While the first-person narrator and the reader often see eye to eye, the other characters only appear as outlines that complement Ina’s vivid experience as counterparts.