Sarah Gerard

First: In 2015, this book has hit the shelves (or, I suspect, mainly the internet booksellers) during the trigger warning debates. I've been following this one from the sidelines, but I don't feel like I'm currently in a position to contribute anything meaningful (re: academia); with this book, I'm making an exception: if you have an active eating disorder or are in recovery, know thyself.

What particularly fascinated me about Gerard's book (and, I hope, would keep it from getting hastily show more labeled as a "misery memoir" loosely coded as fiction) is the efficiency of form. Abbreviated sections, almost reminiscent of flash fiction if they were to stand alone, perfectly capture a protagonist who is both shrinking and shattering. She has flashes of clarity and truly luminous thought (Gerard uses ongoing astronomy imagery and metaphors to convey these; make no mistake that these are extremely complex and not at all trite reflections about twinkly stars and moonbeams). Jumbled up in these moments of beauty are the vile and the mundane: each brief passage stands alone as a piece of a narrator who is herself losing all internal and external cohesion/coherence.

I did not expect a "traditional," tidy ending, but I did end up somewhat confounded. What transpired did bear on some themes in the novel, but, ultimately, it seemed too distant from what I would have identified as the core issues. Because it strayed from the narrator's overall concerns (what she voices most in the majority of the novel), it read less like a twist or surprise end than a confusing one.

Overall, this was an excellent debut, and I hope there's more to come. show less

Nina is drifting through life, and choosing the worst men along the way. She becomes involved with Seth, an artist, who doesn't really do much, but also can't be bothered with her. Even if he asks her to come over, he may not answer the door when she arrives. Yet, this only heightens her ardor and when she moves to New York from Florida to attend an MFA program, Seth comes along because he wants to live in New York and she's willing to pack up his stuff, rent the moving van and make housing show more arrangements for them in New York. But in New York, Seth is incapable of holding a job, unwilling to do menial work, leaving Nina scrambling to support both of them. When Seth turns jealous and needy, Nina switches over to Aaron, with as much drama and conflict that she can wring out of the situation.

Nina is a lot to deal with. The friends she manages to keep are all messes themselves, as is her mother. There's a whole genre of novel of women destroying their own lives over terrible men, similar to the WMFuN,* but differing in that in these novels, selfless men don't leap out to help the women, nor is eventual forgiveness a given. But usually, and usually in most novels, there's character development, the protagonist is changed over the course of the novel, or seems like they would like to, at least. That doesn't happen here. Nina's path is a circular one, endlessly repeating the same behaviors, endlessly justifying them with the language she picked up in therapy. And since Nina's behavior is the same at the end of the book as it was at the beginning, the beginning and end are merely arbitrary. She'll switch men at some point, take advantage of different acquaintances and co-workers next time, find a new thing to be utterly irresponsible about.

Gerard can write well. And she can create scenes that are so vivid I would cringe. But the lack of an arc to this story left me feeling unmoored. What's the point of reading about a terrible person continuing to be terrible in the same way to different people? I do love an unlikeable narrator, but Nina's self pity and manipulations never led anywhere. Still, Gerard clearly has a great deal of promise as a novelist and I look forward to seeing how her writing develops.

* White Male Fuck-up Novel show less

This book kind of made me feel sick. That's not necessarily a bad thing. I just had a very visceral experience with the characters. Reading the story felt like riding the teacups at Disneyland. It's all very dizzying. What's interesting is that the main character has created such an illusion of control, but she is clearly spinning, spinning, spinning. Part of me still wonders what became of the characters. I wanted more of a resolution. Still, it was a good read. An interesting read. Very show more poetic. show less

2.5 stars

... Meh...

Think Leaving Las Vegas, but with an alcoholic & a bulimic/anorexic, instead of a hooker.

This book feels more like an exercise than a novel.

If it's fulfilling an assignment in nihilism, then it should get an A . Sarah Gerard does an outstanding job of capturing the will to cease to exist. Using the metaphors of the binary star system, the white dwarf, the red giant, & other astronomical imagery, it's clear that the un-named narrator is trying to blink out of existence. show more The author's use of current pop magazine headlines - also filled with "stars" - is clever. Somehow the narrator understands the celestial bodies far better than her Earth-bound compatriots. She doesn't recognize them or their struggles as her own. She'd rather emulate the heavens.

Adding to her misery is her alcoholic boyfriend. He doesn't seem to want to die. But he doesn't seem to really want to live, either. She knows he's not making her life better, but she accepts him as part of the stellar system she inhabits. They are bad for each other, & it doesn't get better.

Perhaps my biggest problem in reading this is that they're both so ill & weak that I can't learn anything from either of them. It's not just that they're flawed; they are so sick with their illnesses that neither can truly claim to think clear enough to participate in a meaningful exchange with anyone. I'm just over protagonists like this. I'd rather read about some horrific monster doing horrible things than read about 2 more weak, useless, ineffectual people doing very little, none of it for any good reason, while they wait to die.

But that's just me show less