I’m staggered that this book not only got published, but has been highly praised. It’s basically stream of consciousness chat from some millenial. What I have deduced is that New York publishing must be full of people who are too old to be millenials and are worried that they may appear irrelevant. Thus, they don’t want to come out and say, this millenial has no clothes.
But I’ll go ahead and say it, because I definitely think this young emperor is most certainly super naked. I get the idea of trying to be super close to the real by actually just writing down what you really said, but damn, what if what you actually said was dull or embarrassingly self-indulgent?
Perhaps actually the self-indulgence is actually what bothered me most. I’m not usually acutely aware of my status as a developing world immigrant, but this book made me feel it. I genuinely can’t imagine feeling that problems this minor deserve to be written up. It’s a scale of entitlement to happiness that I am both annoyed by and envious of.
Less you think I am exaggerating, let me tell you that one of the most important conflicts of this book is when one girl buys the same dress as another girl.
Let’s end with possibly the only good paragraph in the book. Well, I don’t know about good. At least horrifying:
We are all specks of dirt, all on this earth at the same time. I look at all the people who are alive today and think, These are my contemporaries. These are my fucking contemporaries! We live in an age of some really great blow-job artists. Every era has its art form. The nineteenth century, I know, was tops for the novel. I just do what I an not to gag too much. I know boyfriends get really excited when they can touch the soft flesh at the back of your throat. At these times, I just try to breathe through my nose and not throw up on their cock. I did vomit a little the other day, but I kept right on sucking.