I first became acquainted with this book because a sample of it was featured in a magazine I had been reading online, maybe The New Yorker. I can’t remember, and it was sometime in 2019 (maybe), but I recall being impressed with the prose in a way I hadn’t felt about other fiction books in a long time. I didn’t try and buy it though. Unclear how well whomever (whoever? whatever, I’m tired) may be reading this right now knows me, but I am so fucking cheap it’s (almost) indicative of a deep[er] psychological problem.
Anyways, fast forward to me creating this challenge for myself. Since I had no place to “source” my books (beyond recommendations from friends, lists on the internet, and whatever came to mind or was already half-read on my bookshelf), I have been highly alert to Kindle sales. This one popped up..the name seemed familiar. Downloaded a sample, realized it was the same book I had started some time ago and decided to buy it.
The highlight of this book was the prose, at least stylistically. The tacit misery and depressive attitude of the author as well as her level of (in my opinion, perceived) helplessness was honestly…exhausting to read about only because in some ways it reminded me of a former self but also only bearable because it was so well-written. The protagonist is a Columbia (we must assume, she is too elitist to name the Ivy League school in New York she attended, instead name dropping everything around it and saying she doesn’t want to say) Comparative Literature undergrad and PhD who was bred into a wealth Palm Beach family helmed by two famed Florida lawyers [this is supposed to be fiction but I believe it is heavily based on the author’s life from either interviews or my own research]. She is white, her husband used to work for Lehman before 08 and started his own carpentry business as a way to shun finance as a result, they have two kids, they live in Brooklyn, and they begin the book by filing for bankruptcy. They don’t have to live paycheck to paycheck, you see. The protagonist’s sister lives in Manhattan, in an apartment the parents bought (and renovated) for her, and does some sort of job where she can afford to have work/life balance because she is underpaid. It’s just that the author doesn’t want help…long ago, in graduate school (her master’s, which became a PhD) she decided that she had had it with her parents for being icy and manipulative. Told them to fuck off and supported herself ever since. To make matters worse (in the author’s opinion), her longtime best friend since HS has fallen off of the face of the Earth and things have been awkward since she started her own family.
Have you ever heard that saying that everyone has a novel in them, it’s just about their own trauma? This feels less like something I’d want to read from a seasoned author and more like that. It’s hard, as someone who was raised in extraordinarily similar circumstances to the author, attended the same university as the author, studied the exact same course as the author, and has the same depressive tendencies as the author, to feel like she has displayed herself in any sort of relatable or sympathetic way here. The essence of this story was so privileged, so steeped in Whiteness and boredom that during what has shaped up to be the worst pandemic this century has ever seen (soon to be the worst Depression, you read it here first, folks!) I could barely get through it. I dislike melodramatic books during normal times — when you add in a mix of my own trauma and the situation the world is currently in, you get something that smells like disgust and distaste. 4/10
