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worstarchitect's review
2.0
Amazing idea and execution, incredibly hilarious and consistently endearing. Nobody has ever committed to the bit this hard. I am really happy that it exists. However, it has one fatal flaw: it is boring. That is the whole point of the book and there's no way it could have been otherwise but the point remains that it is in fact boring to read. I was bored. I am 400 pages into this 700 page book and I am giving up because it's boring. It's still funny and still endearing but it's literally just someone else's life. It's like My Struggle without the bite. It kind of works because Megan Boyle's life is a strange mix of really interesting and really boring, and if it was too far in either direction it wouldn't work at all, but I find myself not wanting to read 300 more pages of the same thing. I would really recommend the first like 200 pages though. After that you get the point.
surefinewhatever's review against another edition
3.0
Hmm. Well.
I saw this at City Lights and thought it looked interesting but already had too many books, and I mostly read on my Kindle anyway, so I put it on my TBR to get it from the library. A few years later, it still sounded interesting but I had to buy it and I have to admit that if I hadn't paid for it I probably wouldn't have finished it. This might be a problem of expectations.
It's tagged as a novel, and I think I was expecting a more edited and fictionalized version of a live blog, or maybe even a novel about someone doing a liveblog this in-depth, but there isn't a central narrative. It really is, by all accounts, entries from a blog kept in 2013. At first I thought to myself that the author did a great job of capturing a realistic narrative from inside someone's head / did a lot of excellent character building, making unlikable people seem interesting. That thought felt rude after it all finally clicked what was going on here.
I skimmed a lot of it, in part because some parts are boring but in part because a lot of the stream-of-consciousness writing feels like it needs to be read very very quickly. I do find it to be an achievement to write in this way. I spent a lot of the book feeling very tense because of how much of it was logged while driving, often while also on drugs - if I'm being honest, this life and the Alt Lit scene sound exhausting. I'm not sure how much I enjoyed this book. I'm not sure I can recommend 708 pages of thoughts to other people. But it was interesting. Sometimes there is a hilarious line, or a really charming observation, or insights that seem full of clarity - those are scattered around in all of the rest though.
I saw this at City Lights and thought it looked interesting but already had too many books, and I mostly read on my Kindle anyway, so I put it on my TBR to get it from the library. A few years later, it still sounded interesting but I had to buy it and I have to admit that if I hadn't paid for it I probably wouldn't have finished it. This might be a problem of expectations.
It's tagged as a novel, and I think I was expecting a more edited and fictionalized version of a live blog, or maybe even a novel about someone doing a liveblog this in-depth, but there isn't a central narrative. It really is, by all accounts, entries from a blog kept in 2013. At first I thought to myself that the author did a great job of capturing a realistic narrative from inside someone's head / did a lot of excellent character building, making unlikable people seem interesting. That thought felt rude after it all finally clicked what was going on here.
I skimmed a lot of it, in part because some parts are boring but in part because a lot of the stream-of-consciousness writing feels like it needs to be read very very quickly. I do find it to be an achievement to write in this way. I spent a lot of the book feeling very tense because of how much of it was logged while driving, often while also on drugs - if I'm being honest, this life and the Alt Lit scene sound exhausting. I'm not sure how much I enjoyed this book. I'm not sure I can recommend 708 pages of thoughts to other people. But it was interesting. Sometimes there is a hilarious line, or a really charming observation, or insights that seem full of clarity - those are scattered around in all of the rest though.
soulpopped's review against another edition
5.0
an all-timer. on the mount rushmore of lotto pod books.
absalomabsalom's review against another edition
5.0
I saw mumblecore for the first time in october at a free screening, and think fondly of that week as one of the best weeks of my life, had just started seeing brian so after the screening he texted me asking when he should come to my apartment and i said i'm going to this afterparty first, he said lmk if it is popping, i said i'll find out if it is so you can maximize your commute and he said "the popping threshold can be low"
This made me laugh and my best friend joel was acting very shocked, like, i was bouncing around and being "itchy" generally, word he uses, he asked me why i was so happy... i was invited to the mumblecore screening by him and his friend alex, i didn't know anything about the film and from the image of 2 people propping up a copy of infinite jest between them i expected something ironic, cold, but during the course of the film like almost immediately upon it started and was clearly a VLC file someone had pressed play on, v endearingly i thought, and the subtitles had tiny millisecond fades at the beginning and end of each sentence onscreen, it was so funny and sweet, the film was very genuinely warm, sad, tender, i was really affected and afterwards the lights came on with no credits and i was feeling really good, this was when i was just starting to be the more candid/open/self-reliant person that i have been since moving back out of 18 months in virginia, last summer/fall everything was seeming incredibly absurd and easy and playable, like moving through the city afterwards it felt like a game
I was talking to alex very openly and genuinely and he was responding with openness and genuineness, i thought: this is so good, and i will see brian tonight, he's somewhere partway on a >1 hour commute to see me, when he showed up he had a shot of fireball in a ring box that he gave me... the lip of the fireball was partway nudging out of the box, the box couldn't close completely around it. I had given the box to him the week before with an adderall xr pressed into the slit of the foam that was in the box. upon receiving the fireball from him i think i felt something utterly good and crazy. the foam was gone, i asked where the foam was. He said i would find out later.
Before this, which was at the party, the lights came on immediately post-mumblecore and megan boyle and jordan castro came out and began doing a q and a, which was very uncomfortable for me, all of the questions being asked felt very strange and rude because obviously the film was a very true document of part of boyle's life... but it seemed like all the questions were about her and pointed in a way that felt cutting and personal and also somewhat distanced in how personal they were, rather than about the movie... i remember feeling really uncomfortable but also liking her (megan boyle) so much and wanting to talk to her, there were things in the film like they were on the street "I hate everyone" "like everyone on the street" etc. that felt like an old mindset i had once worn and no longer identified with, and i liked that she seemed happy and nervous but also more confident and clearly so able to be warm/open/sincere even with the sorts of questions being asked and the unnatural overhang of the structure of: very personal film being shown and then subject/creator of the film appears in q and a directly after, i wished there was no q and a so i could leave afterward and be on the street and think about the movie myself
I wished i had seen it on a laptop, which i did for the second time, maybe 1-2 weeks ago while reading this book
I liked megan boyle so much, but didn't read this book until now, i have carried it/her mindvoice with me for all of march and it has felt heavy, valuable, sad, and comforting, it felt different than reading normally does like somehow some kind of pale transparent boundary that appears and i have to push through while entering reading or "reading state" normally didn't exist at all here, i read most of this book on my phone, i read the first i think 80 pages or something on the amazon.com LOOK INSIDE preview and then immediately borrowed the book on my phone library app, so i read it generally while doing the exact things she was describing doing and feeling less like i was reading than i don't know, communing, or feeling another life lived in parallel to mine and sometimes cleaving very close to mine in almost skin-like contacct it felt like a direct connection, very direct, sometimes intense and i could not tell what parts of my mood were my own and which were some kind of emotional offcharge from this woman almost 10 years ago removed through time and set off in the air around me
I am incredibly hungry right now and feels good to recognize that, but also feel that it is making me write strangely/badly but also i feel like it's necessary to type this all out right now, in the name of like memory/document/"optimal truth" or optimal initial reaction to this book, or something, i don't want to be presumptuous at all but i feel like "megan boyle" would understand, as in the megan boyle i felt i knew from the screening and feel like i know from this book, very spiky and funny and loving and sort of cathartic-ally "unclean", in the same ways i feel like i am beginning to understand i am those things and that if i am not on my side, who is?
Felt towards the end hurtling towards, is there an ending here, will she be OK, will I be OK, will this book just be a long smooth length of general bleakness and then end, but in the last few pages, when boyle is full of rage, it feels like she is gathering herself... to be on her own side and carry herself with her and also end LIVEBLOG
Because of this book i have started my own document because typing vs journaling longhand as i have historically done feels also like it closes the boundary partially... like my internal voice is getting closer to bleeding into my fiction voice or i am optimizing both into the truest, sharpest point of VOICE
I like her so much i liked this book so much I like it better than anything tao lin has written and i think now i'm done w/ alt lit, i understand it and i understand what has forked off from it now into 2022 and so i can expunge and find my own thing alongside, away from. i am so happy megan boyle is OK and much more private and seemingly flourishing and it feels good, feels so hopeful, i don't feel the parasocial connection i felt at first but something unglued and like... Tandem, simultaneous
Only 2 highlights i made, for some reason:
I don't know if that will work
The afternoon after the night of mumblecore and post-mumblecore subsequent party after i had taken i think 1 adderall xr and 2 focalin ir each w/ brian, after we had had a night of (joyously shouting: BENDER!) BENDER! i think around 4-5 pm he left and on his way out the door he stuffed something soft and chemical-structured in my hand, it was the ring box foam, inside was a little thorny ring he had soldered as replacement for the ring i had given him, drunk, maybe the first week i knew him, it kept scratching me for the entire time i had it, sometimes i would bleed
Then he called and texted repeatedly until i saw my phone and ran down to unlock the apartment for him again because he had left the full contents of his pockets, wallet included, on the floor of my room, by the bed
This made me laugh and my best friend joel was acting very shocked, like, i was bouncing around and being "itchy" generally, word he uses, he asked me why i was so happy... i was invited to the mumblecore screening by him and his friend alex, i didn't know anything about the film and from the image of 2 people propping up a copy of infinite jest between them i expected something ironic, cold, but during the course of the film like almost immediately upon it started and was clearly a VLC file someone had pressed play on, v endearingly i thought, and the subtitles had tiny millisecond fades at the beginning and end of each sentence onscreen, it was so funny and sweet, the film was very genuinely warm, sad, tender, i was really affected and afterwards the lights came on with no credits and i was feeling really good, this was when i was just starting to be the more candid/open/self-reliant person that i have been since moving back out of 18 months in virginia, last summer/fall everything was seeming incredibly absurd and easy and playable, like moving through the city afterwards it felt like a game
I was talking to alex very openly and genuinely and he was responding with openness and genuineness, i thought: this is so good, and i will see brian tonight, he's somewhere partway on a >1 hour commute to see me, when he showed up he had a shot of fireball in a ring box that he gave me... the lip of the fireball was partway nudging out of the box, the box couldn't close completely around it. I had given the box to him the week before with an adderall xr pressed into the slit of the foam that was in the box. upon receiving the fireball from him i think i felt something utterly good and crazy. the foam was gone, i asked where the foam was. He said i would find out later.
Before this, which was at the party, the lights came on immediately post-mumblecore and megan boyle and jordan castro came out and began doing a q and a, which was very uncomfortable for me, all of the questions being asked felt very strange and rude because obviously the film was a very true document of part of boyle's life... but it seemed like all the questions were about her and pointed in a way that felt cutting and personal and also somewhat distanced in how personal they were, rather than about the movie... i remember feeling really uncomfortable but also liking her (megan boyle) so much and wanting to talk to her, there were things in the film like they were on the street "I hate everyone" "like everyone on the street" etc. that felt like an old mindset i had once worn and no longer identified with, and i liked that she seemed happy and nervous but also more confident and clearly so able to be warm/open/sincere even with the sorts of questions being asked and the unnatural overhang of the structure of: very personal film being shown and then subject/creator of the film appears in q and a directly after, i wished there was no q and a so i could leave afterward and be on the street and think about the movie myself
I wished i had seen it on a laptop, which i did for the second time, maybe 1-2 weeks ago while reading this book
I liked megan boyle so much, but didn't read this book until now, i have carried it/her mindvoice with me for all of march and it has felt heavy, valuable, sad, and comforting, it felt different than reading normally does like somehow some kind of pale transparent boundary that appears and i have to push through while entering reading or "reading state" normally didn't exist at all here, i read most of this book on my phone, i read the first i think 80 pages or something on the amazon.com LOOK INSIDE preview and then immediately borrowed the book on my phone library app, so i read it generally while doing the exact things she was describing doing and feeling less like i was reading than i don't know, communing, or feeling another life lived in parallel to mine and sometimes cleaving very close to mine in almost skin-like contacct it felt like a direct connection, very direct, sometimes intense and i could not tell what parts of my mood were my own and which were some kind of emotional offcharge from this woman almost 10 years ago removed through time and set off in the air around me
I am incredibly hungry right now and feels good to recognize that, but also feel that it is making me write strangely/badly but also i feel like it's necessary to type this all out right now, in the name of like memory/document/"optimal truth" or optimal initial reaction to this book, or something, i don't want to be presumptuous at all but i feel like "megan boyle" would understand, as in the megan boyle i felt i knew from the screening and feel like i know from this book, very spiky and funny and loving and sort of cathartic-ally "unclean", in the same ways i feel like i am beginning to understand i am those things and that if i am not on my side, who is?
Felt towards the end hurtling towards, is there an ending here, will she be OK, will I be OK, will this book just be a long smooth length of general bleakness and then end, but in the last few pages, when boyle is full of rage, it feels like she is gathering herself... to be on her own side and carry herself with her and also end LIVEBLOG
Because of this book i have started my own document because typing vs journaling longhand as i have historically done feels also like it closes the boundary partially... like my internal voice is getting closer to bleeding into my fiction voice or i am optimizing both into the truest, sharpest point of VOICE
I like her so much i liked this book so much I like it better than anything tao lin has written and i think now i'm done w/ alt lit, i understand it and i understand what has forked off from it now into 2022 and so i can expunge and find my own thing alongside, away from. i am so happy megan boyle is OK and much more private and seemingly flourishing and it feels good, feels so hopeful, i don't feel the parasocial connection i felt at first but something unglued and like... Tandem, simultaneous
Only 2 highlights i made, for some reason:
I don't know if that will work
The afternoon after the night of mumblecore and post-mumblecore subsequent party after i had taken i think 1 adderall xr and 2 focalin ir each w/ brian, after we had had a night of (joyously shouting: BENDER!) BENDER! i think around 4-5 pm he left and on his way out the door he stuffed something soft and chemical-structured in my hand, it was the ring box foam, inside was a little thorny ring he had soldered as replacement for the ring i had given him, drunk, maybe the first week i knew him, it kept scratching me for the entire time i had it, sometimes i would bleed
Then he called and texted repeatedly until i saw my phone and ran down to unlock the apartment for him again because he had left the full contents of his pockets, wallet included, on the floor of my room, by the bed
big_doz's review
5.0
At first, after a couple of pages in, this book was just an interesting and somewhat shocking viewport into the life of an incredibly dysfunctional person (no offence Mego). It was uncomfortable tbh, to like, know all this stuff about someone straight up; skipping all the social foreplay and jumping right into a settled relationship. It was gross in the beginning, like, FFS Megan, please take a shower.
However, overtime you get to know Megan, and this read transforms into more of a 'hanging out' than a distanced voyeuristic spectacle.
This book was an absolute pleasure to read and I'd recommend it to anyone thats in a reading slump. So easy to pick up, but at the same time easy to take a break from.
I'd be riding the train to work whilst Megan contemplates life in her car. I'd be lying in bed whilst Megan is making a green juice or snorting heroin. As some other reviewers have said, this book will have wondering from time to time, 'what is Megan up to now?'
Basically...buy this book and hangout with Megan, she's your new, personal dysfunctional best friend. 10/10 experience.
However, overtime you get to know Megan, and this read transforms into more of a 'hanging out' than a distanced voyeuristic spectacle.
This book was an absolute pleasure to read and I'd recommend it to anyone thats in a reading slump. So easy to pick up, but at the same time easy to take a break from.
I'd be riding the train to work whilst Megan contemplates life in her car. I'd be lying in bed whilst Megan is making a green juice or snorting heroin. As some other reviewers have said, this book will have wondering from time to time, 'what is Megan up to now?'
Basically...buy this book and hangout with Megan, she's your new, personal dysfunctional best friend. 10/10 experience.
jung's review
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Probably about 50 pages into this book, I came to that rare understanding I have sometimes with very few books: that I was reading something really special - something that I had never read before. It’s weird how these things can age. Like, if I was reading it during the time that Megan was recording every waking moment in her life, as the liveblog was “live,” Im not sure it would have had the same impact. But I think Megan has both consciously and subconsciously created one of the most dynamic works of art that I have had the pleasure of reading, period.
Simply by trying to record everything that she experiences online, Megan has created these fascinating meta-textual dynamics and contours that distort and shift the boundaries between the consumption of art, both the theoretical and practical production of it, how this production affects her life / others in relation to the general day-to-day mundanity, and how it helps(?) her climb out of an intense, intense depression she was going through at the time she wrote this. Despite this book being one of the sole things on my mind for the past two weeks, I am still trying to wrap my head around what she’s accomplished. There are essays to be written on this stuff. There have been essays written on this stuff (see the New Yorker’s “’iveblog’ and the limits of autofiction.”)
Some of the most interesting extra-textual dynamics (to me)
-How the megan’s relationship to the liveblog changes as she comes to the understanding that there are times where discretion is advisable. Ie. her finding the limits of what she can write about.
-How liveblog directly affects her life. Megan / other people read her transcriptions of past events and it distorts their recollection of the events. How she and others censor themselves / their future actions based on the idea of said “thing” being included or excluded from the liveblog.
-Liveblog is a brute attempt to add direction in a life that has spiraled out of control. To parse meaning out of the mundanity.
-How Megan uses it as a tool to remember, form herself into a better person by having her actions held accountable by her audience.
-The more that she writes, the less time she has to create content she can write about. Certain updates taking hours to write. Or having to cut updates short to meet a friend.
-Megan's pleas to be viewed as a real person. That the liveblog isn't a work of fiction, but are her genuine thoughts and feelings. That there is a person behind all of it.
-Megan's pleas to be viewed as a real person. That the liveblog isn't a work of fiction, but are her genuine thoughts and feelings. That there is a person behind all of it.
-The way she records her days. When she records, when she doesn’t record. Why she might record or not record. It’s a granular drip of mundanity, of passing days, and yet it’s still an incomplete recollection of her existence.
-Just plain wondering: why am I reading so much uninteresting detail about this person’s life?
Some of the interesting textual dynamics
-Liveblog is a time capsule of early era social-media. Gchat (google chat) is referenced a lot.
-The relationship between her and her parents. (Made me miss mine).
-Somewhat milk toast but all-too-accurate depictions of depression. Both knowingly and unknowingly.
-Megan’s relationship to drug use. How that affects her romantic relationships.
-Her desire to find employment. Her inability to follow through with the actions that would help that.
-Megan exuding a late-20’s existential crisis vibe, being aware of doing so.
To be fair, not all of the textual content is interesting, so it doesn’t necessarily translate well into [like, actual reading]. Parts drag. But that’s kind of the point. I am thinking, right now, of all the books that have been written, and how much of that ground has been covered. Nearly everything to be written has already been written, the days of form experimentation are largely behind us and everything we do is built upon past figures (This is already sounding like I'm navel-gazing, etc.). But Megan found a pocket that had not been explored. And I don’t know how influential this work will be - it seems that this is Autofiction taken to its logical conclusion: a dead end (Megan stops live-blogging because of this) - but I think it important that it has has been explored and that there is a catalogue of what that means, regardless.
Gargantuan in its undertaking that I have nothing but respect for Megan for doing. Brave to a point of foolishness, at certain points. Stubborn, silly, but also painfully honest.
jillrisberg's review
read a bit and then read critical essays ab it, this was the right choice
gianni_francis's review
3.0
I loved this nonfiction novel, then I hated this nonfiction novel, and now I am somewhere safely in the middle, though not desensitized to numbness.
Megan Boyle should be admired for her exhaustive writing efforts and uncompromising honesty, which is too personal for comfort. (And probably the point.) Liveblog is as much writing as it is living, and there is something uniquely performative about the "mundane" she describes, as extremely sad/drug induced as her mundane is for the average impressionable reader.
When I hated Liveblog in 2020 my problem wasn't with Boyle's frequently funny and introspective writing, it was the tone of revelry in her degeneracy; hating Liveblog was my 2020 response to my disgust with my own degeneracy of 2013. And after re-reading my own blogs/diaries from that year--thanks to liveblog making me curious--I found myself using the same tone: Nonchalant, dismissive, humorous, nihilistic. It is self-destructive poetry.
Liveblog is a seven-month snapshot of the worst months of Boyle's life. And as much as I personally identify with it, it demands an introductory retrospective, and an afterword. Megan Boyle is alive, but is she Ok? Or is she the same disturbed person from Liveblog? Or is she disturbed in new ways? The book feels incomplete because Megan Boyle is indeed (thankfully) still alive. Thus is the weakness of putting oneself into one's art: taking all criticism personally (which may be why all reviews are so glowing, so as not to offend) and leaving it incomplete as one's life continues, and changes.
Which is why Proust nearly died writing In Remembrance of Things Past simultaneously writing to make it 'endless'; and why Leve killed himself after writing Suicide. Liveblog fits into this category of literature, somewhere, somehow. A compliment indeed.
2013 is long ago, and Liveblog will be a historical peek into the mind of millennials for as long as future generations still care to read. It will not age well, not because it is poorly written; because the millennial generation will not age well, due to the nihilistic glee that they reveled in, as promoted by a Voice of that generation, and lauded, as evidenced by the glowing reviews.
Why are humans so attracted to evil? Is it because a chaste, virtuous version of Liveblog be boring? Is it because living virtuously is boring? Is being entertained all that matters? Is pleasure all that matters? Clearly, no. If pleasure was all that mattered, Boyle would never have attempted to write Liveblog to demonstrate why pleasures, and idleness, has spiritually murdered an entire generation.
Megan Boyle should be admired for her exhaustive writing efforts and uncompromising honesty, which is too personal for comfort. (And probably the point.) Liveblog is as much writing as it is living, and there is something uniquely performative about the "mundane" she describes, as extremely sad/drug induced as her mundane is for the average impressionable reader.
When I hated Liveblog in 2020 my problem wasn't with Boyle's frequently funny and introspective writing, it was the tone of revelry in her degeneracy; hating Liveblog was my 2020 response to my disgust with my own degeneracy of 2013. And after re-reading my own blogs/diaries from that year--thanks to liveblog making me curious--I found myself using the same tone: Nonchalant, dismissive, humorous, nihilistic. It is self-destructive poetry.
Liveblog is a seven-month snapshot of the worst months of Boyle's life. And as much as I personally identify with it, it demands an introductory retrospective, and an afterword. Megan Boyle is alive, but is she Ok? Or is she the same disturbed person from Liveblog? Or is she disturbed in new ways? The book feels incomplete because Megan Boyle is indeed (thankfully) still alive. Thus is the weakness of putting oneself into one's art: taking all criticism personally (which may be why all reviews are so glowing, so as not to offend) and leaving it incomplete as one's life continues, and changes.
Which is why Proust nearly died writing In Remembrance of Things Past simultaneously writing to make it 'endless'; and why Leve killed himself after writing Suicide. Liveblog fits into this category of literature, somewhere, somehow. A compliment indeed.
2013 is long ago, and Liveblog will be a historical peek into the mind of millennials for as long as future generations still care to read. It will not age well, not because it is poorly written; because the millennial generation will not age well, due to the nihilistic glee that they reveled in, as promoted by a Voice of that generation, and lauded, as evidenced by the glowing reviews.
Why are humans so attracted to evil? Is it because a chaste, virtuous version of Liveblog be boring? Is it because living virtuously is boring? Is being entertained all that matters? Is pleasure all that matters? Clearly, no. If pleasure was all that mattered, Boyle would never have attempted to write Liveblog to demonstrate why pleasures, and idleness, has spiritually murdered an entire generation.