Real Life made me feel sad and angry and lonely and frustrated. I am an empath by nature, so it’s very hard for me not to put myself in someone else’s shoes when they are hurting.
I felt the loneliness and self-esteem issues that led to the relationship to begin with. Taylor writes this so well that while I was screaming in my head for Wallace to get out of that toxic relationship, I also totally understood why it was happening.
There are situations in his past that he has not been able to work through (or has intentionally not worked through) that are related to his bad decision making about relationships. Wallace is a flawed individual, as we all are. He gets sexually involved with a (self-professed) straight, white “friend,” and their relationship is truly toxic (duh, for many reasons). Taylor really makes the reader feel what Wallace is going through, and some of that stuff might be a trigger for some readers. This was a very difficult novel to read, and it’s obvious Brandon Taylor wanted it that way. When everything in life comes to a head all at once and it feels like everything is falling apart. The novel is set over the course of a weekend, and it’s one of those times in life when nothing seems to go right. What makes it worse is that Wallace is the only Black - and queer - student in his department, so this sabotage is most likely part of the microagressions (and outright racism) he experiences on a daily basis.Īt the same time, everything in his life is kind of turning to shit, not necessarily permanently, but more in the way of this-weekend-is-shit-and-nothing-is-going-right. Real Life is a campus novel about a biochemistry doctoral student (Wallace) at a Midwest university whose culminating experiment is ruined, most likely through sabotage by another student.
GoodreadsĬW (for book): depression, sexual assault, sexual violence, physical violence But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends-some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree.
0 kommentar(er)
