Reviews with content warning for Toxic relationship - Real Life

Reviews tagging 'Toxic relationship'

Real Life by Brandon Taylor

67 reviews

jcinf's review against another edition

dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I have a tough time rating this one.

First, I appreciated the portrayal of tokenism and racism in LGBTQ+ spaces.

Two things I had mixed feelings toward (I promise no spoilers):

Wallace’s friend group felt “meh” at best. I get that the author probably wanted to portray Wallace as being an outcast in his group. I know that’s the core part of the narrative here. ** BUT, I couldn’t tell… was Wallace having a hard time reconciling his friends’ problematic qualities against their redeemable traits? Or were they just shitty people that he became “friends” with solely out of proximity? It was well written, but I would have appreciated more clarity on this.
Wallace’s dynamic with another character in the book. I won’t say who so I don’t spoil it. It’s hard for authors to walk the line between glorifying abuse and simply portraying it. I think in large pet he just portrayed in, but in certain parts I felt like it was getting perhaps a little close to romanticizing it. The second to last chapter brought those feelings up for me.

Overall, though, I felt largely positively about this book. A handful of the things I liked:

The descriptiveness was stunning.
The dialogue was realistic and appropriately emotional.
The depiction of nuanced grief and the way some people try to simplify it.
This one is a loose spoiler as far as character growth, but doesn’t reveal any specific plot points.
The acknowledgment that Wallace can be self-absorbed. Butttt also giving him wiggle room to be that way because of his intersecting struggles due to his sexuality, race, economic class, and generally feeling behind in his academics.
.

As a whole, this book was wonderfully written. But it wasn’t really an enjoyable read because it was so damn sad lol.

Content Warnings

cadystanton's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

Content Warnings

katdid's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

Pretty sad and depressing book tbh. I had a real sense of dread while reading it. The narrative takes place over three days and coupled with the descriptions of the stifling weather it reads as v claustrophobic. Some of the content/situations put me in mind of <u>A Little Life</u> --

just, Wallace seems to expect that he'll be treated with sexual violence and not believe he's worth any more than that. I found him a frustrating character because he was so passive. I kind of felt ambivalent about the book until the final chapter which is pitch-perfect and makes (imo) everything hang together (but also more upsetting/devastating). It's a great study of how you gather people around you based on circumstances (in this case, graduate school) but how maybe they aren't really your people.

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_fallinglight_'s review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

Content Warnings

snoodle_poodle's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.5

Content Warnings

trashfford's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

TW: SA, homophobia, racism

This book is a great portrayal of loneliness in a crowd. The ending felt rushed to me, but the writing was impeccable. It was traumatic and beautiful. I loved it.

Content Warnings

mourtarymaggots's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Content Warnings

sfx_naike's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Content Warnings

bookishmillennial's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

disclaimer if you’ve read other reviews by me and are noticing a pattern: You’re correct that I don’t really give starred reviews, I feel like a peasant and don’t like leaving them and most often, I will only leave them if I vehemently despised a book. I enjoy most books for what they are, & I extract lessons from them all. Everyone’s reading experiences are subjective, so I hope my reviews provide enough information to let you know if a book is for you or not, regardless if I add stars or not. Find me on Instagram: @bookish.millennial or tiktok: @bookishmillennial

Premise:

contemporary adult, dark academia, literary fiction
third-person limited POV of main character
Wallace, gay, fat, and Black graduate student in biochemistry in a Midwestern city, navigates being the only Black person in his group of friends, all while ruminating if he wants to remain in the graduate program
He begins a quiet romance/friends-with-benefits situation with one of his other friends, who is not out yet
He endures constant covert and overt acts of racism from his friends and his labmates
He shares his past and grapples with his father's passing
cw: rape, rape of a minor, racism, gaslighting, classism, death of a parent, homophobia, infidelity, white people who claim they are allies yet never speak the fuck up (they absolutely posted their little black square in 2020 and proceeded to change nothing in their day-to-day lives)

Thoughts:
I'm not a fat, Black, gay man in a STEM program in the Midwest. However, as a small, AAPI, bi/pan woman who works in academia (in a STEM department), I hate to tell you that though this book is fiction, it rang sooooooo true. I cringed, I got upset, I put down the book at times. It hit too close to home as far as how the "allies" around us act and do not ever try to regulate the acts of others. Wallace chose to keep quiet, keep to himself, and to immediately admit wrongdoing whenever he was accused of it because he had to. It's what society taught him was needed of him in order to survive in the world.

Do not expect to love these characters! They are garbage! They are not characters -- they are representative of so many real life people I know. People who posted BLM all over their instagram pages in 2020, and have resumed regularly scheduled programming since. These are people who think "kindness" and toxic positivity can solve all of the world's problems. My RBF was strong reading some of these characters' responses to Wallace, in trying to justify the way they treat him, all while he has to sit there are take it. It was devastating, infuriating, and mind-boggling how they didn't have one bit of self-awareness or courage to stand up for their friend, ever.

Brandon Taylor really just dropped the mic with this book. It's heavy and it's heart breaking but it's real. So the title is wildly fitting. Real life? I believe it.

Quotations that stood out to me:

Like Wallace and their other friends, they had all come to this Midwestern city to pursue graduate studies in biochemistry. Their class had been the first small one in quite some time, and the first in more than three decades to include a black person. In his less generous moments, Wallace thought these two things related, that a narrowing, a reduction in the number of applicants, had made his admission possible.

It was not the first time his plates had become contaminated or moldy. This had been common in his first year, before his technique and cleanliness improved. Before he knew to be vigilant, cautious. He was different now. He knew enough to keep his strains safe.

Laughing because it was funny to him in a way that was difficult to clarify. Like a joke leaping unexpectedly from an entirely random arrangement of circumstances. In the past few months, for the first time in his four years of graduate school, he had begun to feel that he might be at the edge of something. H
“We love a martyr,” Vincent said. “I suppose that’s what we’ll be talking about tonight. Our Lady of Perpetual Lab.”

He was unhappy, and for the first time in his life, that unhappiness did not seem entirely necessary. Sometimes he yearned to trust this impulse, to leap out of his life and into the vast, incalculable void of the world.

The words fell out of him like the exhalation of some hot, dense space inside him, and when he was done talking, he looked up, thinking that no one had really been paying attention. That’s how it was. He talked and people drifted in and out of concentration. But when he looked up, Wallace saw that each of them was looking at him with what seemed to be tender shock.

He smiled because he was not sure how to meet someone’s sympathy for him. It always seemed to him that when people were sad for you, they were sad for themselves, as if your misfortune were just an excuse for them to feel what it was they wanted to feel. Sympathy was a kind of ventriloquism.

“It’s like that. It always hurts worse than you expect, even if it doesn’t do any real harm.”

Things moved through the group in this way, information sliding around as if through an invisible circulatory system, carried on veins made of text messages, emails, and whispered conversations at parties.

How long had it been since Wallace had slept well and easily? How long had it been since he had felt beyond the world’s grasp?

“What I know is that it doesn’t matter if you didn’t know them or they didn’t know you. My mom was a real bitch. She was mean and hateful and a liar and spent my whole life tearing me down. But when she died, I really . . . I don’t know, your parents aren’t people until they’re suffering. They aren’t people until they’re gone.”

People can be unpredictable in their cruelty.

Strange that he has become a person who kisses. The coppery taste of shame at betraying oneself. Nausea, as if he must now explain this change to some higher power, some greater authority. He is surprised at himself, at his traitorous body. His mind a tumult, hazy and dark shapes opening, turning upon themselves.

It wasn’t the world outside that he had needed to drown out, then, but the world inside, the interior of the house, which had always seemed so much wilder and stranger to him than anything he found walking alone in the woods.

He managed not forgiveness, but erasure. They seem so much the same to him.

The unfair thing, he thinks, is that she is afforded this moment to vent herself. She will be fine. She will be all right. She is gifted, and he is merely Wallace. None of this is fair. None of this is good, he knows. But he also knows that the point is not fairness. The point is not to be treated fairly or well. The point is to get your work done. The point is results. He could say something to her, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter because no one is going to do his work for him. No one is going to say, Well, Wallace, it’s okay if you don’t have your part of the data. You were ...more

The most unfair part of it, Wallace thinks, is that when you tell white people that something is racist, they hold it up to the light and try to discern if you are telling the truth. As if they can tell by the grain if something is racist or not, and they always trust their own judgment. It’s unfair because white people have a vested interest in underestimating racism, its amount, its intensity, its shape, its effects. They are the fox in the henhouse.

She spoke as though she were bestowing blessings. Bestowing beneficence. Bestowing irrefutable grace. She spoke as though she were saving him. What could he say? What could he do? Nothing. Except to work. And now the work has been turned on him. His work is an insult to them. She hates him because he works, but he works only so that people might not hate him and might not rescind his place in the world. He works only so that he might get by in life on whatever he can muster. None of it will save him, he sees now. None of it can save him.

How can Cole, of all people, doubt himself, who he is, when the person he presents to the world is so carefully constructed? It’s only now, even, that Wallace is aware of a certain puckering at the seams, a hint of construction showing through. It’s only now that he realizes that all along, Cole has perhaps been smiling with teeth to hide a grimace.

It is why he does not trust memory. Memory sifts. Memory lifts. Memory makes due with what it is given. Memory is not about facts. Memory is an inconsistent measurement of the pain in one’s life.

What Roman is referring to is instead a deficiency of whiteness, a lack of some requisite sameness. This deficiency cannot be overcome. The fact is, no matter how hard he tries or how much he learns or how many skills he masters, he will always be provisional in the eyes of these people, no matter how they might be fond of him or gentle with him.

Emma puts her head on Wallace’s shoulder, but she won’t say anything either, can’t bring herself to. No one does. No one ever does. Silence is their way of getting by, because if they are silent long enough, then this moment of minor discomfort will pass for them, will fold down into the landscape of the evening as if it never happened. Only Wallace will remember it. That’s the frustrating part. Wallace is the only one for whom this is a humiliation. He breathes out through the agony of it, through the pressure in his chest.

They are always laughing. This is it, Wallace thinks. That’s how they get by. Silence and laughter, silence and laughter, switch and swing. The way one glides through this life without having to think about anything hard. He still feels the sting of embarrassment, but it has ebbed.

Zoe seems nice, but in the way that white people are nice right before they perform some new role in the secret machinery that ruins black people’s lives.

It is a deflection, and a bad one at that, which annoys Wallace. A deflection out of kindness. A kindness that seeks to encompass all futures, that asserts its constancy regardless of what might come.

Kindness is a debt, Wallace thinks. Kindness is something owed and something repaid. Kindness is an obligation.

“I don’t know if it’s good. Sometimes, I think that this is all I’ve ever wanted. Good research. Steady. Learning all the time. Other days I’m just miserable and want to cry. We all are, I think. In our way. We’re all fucking miserable in this place. But then, to actually hear it. It’s like somebody said something rude during church.” “Is this church?” “Hush, you know what I mean. I felt like, Oh no, oh no. First, I wanted to hug you. Because I’ve had days like that. Then I wanted to strangle you so you’d hush and not make us all think about it.” But the difference, Wallace wants to say, is ...more

There were days in all their lives when things went wrong and they were forced to ask themselves if they wanted to go on. Decisions were made every day about what sort of life they wanted, and they always answered the same: Only this, only this. But that was the misery of trying to become something, misery that you could put up with because it was native to the act of trying. But there are other kinds of misery, the misery that comes from other people.

He could say this. It seems possible. But he knows what will happen. Wallace rolls his shoulders. If he makes a point of this, Emma will shake her head. She will refuse it. She will say that he’s pitying himself, that he’s not special. That he is not alone in his feeling of inadequacy. And this is perhaps a little true. And it’s that small truth of it that makes it dangerous to him. They do not understand that for them it will get better, while for him the misery will only change shape. She will say, Get over yourself, Wally, and she will smile and put her arms around his shoulders, and she ...more

There will always be good white people who love him and want the best for him but who are more afraid of other white people than of letting him down. It is easier for them to let it happen and to triage the wound later than to introduce an element of the unknown into the situation. No matter how good they are, no matter how loving, they will always be complicit, a danger, a wound waiting to happen. There is no amount of loving that will ever bring Miller closer to him in this respect. There is no amount of desire. There will always remain a small space between them...

That is the really wonderful thing about living in a place to which you are not connected. It cannot lay a claim on who you were before you arrived there, and all anyone knows of you is what you tell them. It was possible to become a different version of himself in the Midwest, a version without a family and without a past, made up entirely as he saw fit.

“You are so determined to be unknowable.”
“We’re always unknowable.”

There were storms every day—thunder and lightning—and I learned to make myself so still I thought I might slide out of my body, thought I might then and there die, cease to be, fold back into the next life as if it were a comfortable bed, so perfectly parallel had I drawn this life to the next. Even then I was spotting and waiting, watching the world pass me by in repeated patterns, the impression of lightning on the window, its shadow thrown long behind it.

There comes a time when you have to stop being who you were, when you have to let the past stay where it is, frozen and impossible. You have to let it go if you’re going to keep moving, if you’re going to survive, because the past doesn’t need a future.

Perhaps friendship is really nothing but controlled cruelty. Maybe that’s all they’re doing, lacerating each other and expecting kindness back. Or maybe it’s just Wallace, lacking friends, lacking an understanding of how friendship works. But he understands cruelty. He understands violence, even if friendship is beyond him.

“What did you mean, then?” That he wants to be alone. That he does not want to speak to anyone. That he does not want to be around anyone. That the world has worn him down. That he would like nothing more than to slip out of his life and into the next. That he is terrified, afraid. That he wants to lie down here and never move again. What he means is that he does not know what he wants, only that it is not this, the way forward paved with words they’ve already said and things they’ve already done. What he wants is to break it all open and try again.

Better to imagine his friends happy than to see their unhappiness up close. And unhappy they certainly would be—that has been the lesson this weekend, hasn’t it? The misery of other people, the persistence of unhappiness, is perhaps all that connects them. Only the prospect of greater unhappiness keeps them within the circumscribed world of graduate school.

It’s not even that he wants to be them—though queer desire has this feature baked in, so better to say it’s not just that he wants to be them. He wants to be not himself. He wants to be not depressed. He wants to be not anxious. He wants to be well. He wants to be good.

The truly awful thing about beauty is that it reminds us of our limits. Beauty is a kind of unrelenting cruelty. It takes the truth, hones it to a terrifying keenness, and uses it to slice us to the bone.

Cruelty, Wallace thinks, is really just the conduit of pain. It conveys pain from one place to another—from the place of highest concentration to the place of lowest concentration, in the same way heat flows. It is a delivery system, as in the way that certain viruses convey illness, disease, irreparable harm. They’re all infected with pain, hurting each other.

Is this all his life is meant to be, the accumulation of other people’s pain? Their assorted tragedies?

But to stay in graduate school, to stay where he is, means to accept the futility of his efforts to blend in seamlessly with those around him. It is a life spent swimming against the gradient, struggling up the channel of other people’s cruelty. It grates him to consider this, the shutting away of the part of him that now throbs and writhes like a new organ that senses so keenly the limitations of his life. Stay here and suffer, or exit and drown, he thinks.

This is perhaps why people get together in the first place. The sharing of time. The sharing of the responsibility of anchoring oneself in the world. Life is less terrible when you can just rest for a moment, put everything down and wait without having to worry about being washed away. People take each other’s hands and they hold on as tight as they can, they hold on to each other and to themselves, and when they let go, they can because they know that the other person will not.

Content Warnings

bossybookworm345's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

Writing was beautiful and poetic without being too serious, but it was dark and a little confusing. It also was only about a single weekend with multiple flashbacks involved, which was fine but meant that not much actually happened; most of the work/events were internal. Also this is just a personal preference but I was really unsatisfied with how things ended

loved the realistic depiction of microagressions and wasn’t too upset with how weirdly tense and violent the relationship of the main character got, but neither of them felt resolved in anyway whatsoever by the end of the book. Not even in a “oh this didn’t end positively/sometimes the bad guys win” kind of way; the situations just didn’t “end” at all. But if you’re not upset about cliffhangers or don’t need your books to be wrapped up neatly with a bow, you’ll likely enjoy the story

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