A review by annabella
Real Life by Brandon Taylor

emotional sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Really warmed and related to Wallace. Would want to read again not as an audiobook, because I think there were so many good quotes in here and good writing that brought me back from drifting off and into !!! Yes!!  Type territory. I like the exploration of life, relationships, power dynamics. The way Wallace thinks- it’s not critiquing it but it is, and it understands where he comes from too, and how everything intersects, and I think that gives him such a fully fleshed character. 
I sort of wish we found out more about the futures of the other characters too. 
This book reminded me of a little life.

Pasting some good quotes for me to remember!

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 undermining racism, its amount, its intensity, its shape, its effects. They are the fox in the henhouse.


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, a space where people like Roman will take root and say ugly, hateful things to him. It’s the place in every white person’s heart where their racism lives and flourishes, not some vast open plain but a small crack, which is all it takes. Wallace presses his tongue flat. “Good white people,” he says.

This is why Wallace never tells anyone anything. This is why he keeps the truth to himself, because other people don’t know what to do with your shit, with the reality of other people’s feelings. They don’t know what to do when they’ve heard something that does not align with their own perception of things.

Being so aware of their bodies makes him aware of his own body, and he becomes aware of the way his body is both a thing on the earth and a vehicle for his entire life's history. His body is both a tangible self and his depression, his anxiety, his wellness, his illness, his disordered eating, the fear of blood pouring out of him. It is both itself and not itself, image and afterimage. He feels unhappy when he looks at someone beautiful or desirable because he feels the gulf between himself and the other, their body and his body. An accounting of his body's failures slides down the back of his eyes, and he sees how far from grace he's been made and planted.

Affection always feels this way for him, like an undue burden, like putting weight and expectation onto someone else. As if affection were a kind of cruelty too.

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.

Anyway omg putting these quotes (stolen from goodreads soz) makes me want to read this again immediately. I remember just how stunning the writing is. 
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