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A review by discotechtig
Pageboy by Elliot Page
3.0
I love Elliot's work and I really wanted to love this book but I just....didn't.
It felt like a few hundred pages of trauma dumping with no...resolution? Not that memoirs need to wrap people's lived experiences into a tidy bow. But without any insights or analysis, it starts to feel like a violent barrage with no purpose. I've read a LOT of autobiographies that wrestle with traumatic experiences and I usually love them. But they need to be something other than a list of terrible things, at least for me. It read more like a therapy journal than something meant to be seen by others. It was so mentally draining to get through that I almost DNF.
This book was also disorganized and difficult to follow, as other reviewers have mentioned. Putting it in chronological order or giving some indication of the time period or age of each section would've been appreciated. He jumped around from all periods of life so it was nearly impossible to track when things were happening. I found myself having to re-read passages after finally getting a clue about when it occurred. My reactions and perspectives were entirely different when I realized that things were happening when he was a child rather an adult. He tends to refer to events based on what he was filming at the time so his IMDB page is a handy cheat sheet for following along. But I began to resent having to constantly google someone just to read their book.
In short, I have a lot of admiration for Elliot. His experiences are valid and I know it took a lot of vulnerability for such a private person to share so much of his life. I hope that writing this was cathartic for him and helped him work through some things. I selfishly wish it had done the same for me.
It felt like a few hundred pages of trauma dumping with no...resolution? Not that memoirs need to wrap people's lived experiences into a tidy bow. But without any insights or analysis, it starts to feel like a violent barrage with no purpose. I've read a LOT of autobiographies that wrestle with traumatic experiences and I usually love them. But they need to be something other than a list of terrible things, at least for me. It read more like a therapy journal than something meant to be seen by others. It was so mentally draining to get through that I almost DNF.
This book was also disorganized and difficult to follow, as other reviewers have mentioned. Putting it in chronological order or giving some indication of the time period or age of each section would've been appreciated. He jumped around from all periods of life so it was nearly impossible to track when things were happening. I found myself having to re-read passages after finally getting a clue about when it occurred. My reactions and perspectives were entirely different when I realized that things were happening when he was a child rather an adult. He tends to refer to events based on what he was filming at the time so his IMDB page is a handy cheat sheet for following along. But I began to resent having to constantly google someone just to read their book.
In short, I have a lot of admiration for Elliot. His experiences are valid and I know it took a lot of vulnerability for such a private person to share so much of his life. I hope that writing this was cathartic for him and helped him work through some things. I selfishly wish it had done the same for me.