*said in a voice that is so filled with affection and is very much not fine* i'm fine!
“he doesn’t fully believe yet that a life this big is availab
*said in a voice that is so filled with affection and is very much not fine* i'm fine!
“he doesn’t fully believe yet that a life this big is available to him. but he knows, now, that it's out there. that this feeling exists, and he is capable of feeling it.”
the moment i flipped open the prospects, i cried. not the first chapter, first page, or first line. the cover page. purely for what it meant to me.
it feels like kt hoffman reached directly into my heart and created gene ionescu just so he could hold my hand and walk alongside me.
perhaps that’s why finally reading the prospects felt this overwhelming. so much of my year has been marked by wanting things so badly i couldn’t bear it. forcing myself to keep my dreams an arm’s length away, not wanting them just in case i didn’t get it. so imagine not allowing myself to read this book for months, only to finally pick it up and see that exact fear reflected back at me.
we often talk about seeing characters as mirrors of ourselves. a look over our shoulders at the person we were in high school or college. a kind nod, a gentle reassurance. but gene? gene is me this very moment. and that is such a kindness that it sometimes makes it hard to breathe.
the way we’re optimists reserved only for others. how we hope terribly for many things, but aren’t much good at letting ourselves /want/ them. that’s where it gets dangerous. the preemptive little griefs he experiences over losing things he never had. i, at best, only know how to microdose on hope, so proficient at starving myself of the things i want as it feels to much to hold onto.
the way we intensely fear disappointing others if we don’t succeed, so we freeze instead. as gene slowly sees that people still love him even as he fails, i was doing the same in real life. we learnt it together. it’s a hand on a shoulder, a quiet confidence, and a dream relentlessly persevering.
but for all that gene walks by my side, by the time i turn the final page, he’s a little ahead of me. i see him beckoning me over with a flick of his wrist and a smile on his face, telling me that’s its okay to let myself have it.
and here i am, running towards him, sunlight on my face, telling him i'm on my fucking way....more
“he could say any of the things he has wanted to say since he came here, about how they treat him, about how they look a
with emotion: fuck academia
“he could say any of the things he has wanted to say since he came here, about how they treat him, about how they look at him, about what it feels like when the only people who look like him are the janitors (…) he could say one million things, but he knows that none would matter. none of it would mean anything to any of them, because they are not interested in how he feels except as it affects them.”
real life sat on my shelf for ages. in a time where i have once again lost my ability to read while waiting to see how Life and Other Things pan out, i didn’t expect any book to hit me at all.
we follow wallace, a queer black biochem student in a predominantly white midwestern university. there, he contemplates his life, his past trauma, his misery, & his very existence in a world he’s on the outskirts of.
i don’t think i’m capable of feeling normal about academia. my blood pressure skyrocketed like every ten pages. academia triggers my fight or flight. the inherent racism, classism, & power dynamics topped off with being a queer person of color makes me want to stand under boiling water.
i constantly wanted to scream at every microaggression & injustice hurled at wallace. how casually racist his friends are, how they constantly sweep things under the rug. i stewed in that hopelessness, unable to do anything but watch wallace take it & take it & take it.
strange then that i loved this book this much.
i’d tell you that lit fic scares me, but that’s now untrue. perhaps it’s my quiet depression or the bleakness of the world but the more i grow lately, the more lit fic draws me in. perhaps i love anything reminiscent of bryan washington’s words: raw & stripped bare.
like everything above, this novel is such a mess of contradictions: simple yet messy, ugly yet beautiful, hopeful yet hopeless, blunt yet lyrical. this book isn’t long. all of that manages to happen over the span of a weekend. it shouldn’t work, but it does. it’s so masterfully done.
& just like real life, there isn’t much of an ending. there’s just life together, passed back & forth to try to alleviate the awful pressure of existing....more
“i feel like space garbage. straight-up low-orbit debris, incinerating in planet pendley's stratosphere."
camp fogridge has always been juliette’s home
“i feel like space garbage. straight-up low-orbit debris, incinerating in planet pendley's stratosphere."
camp fogridge has always been juliette’s home, one that’s wholly hers. except it isn’t anymore, not when childhood rival priya pendley shows up as juliette’s cabinmate and risks ruining her final summer before she says goodbye forever.
can we talk about summer camp for a sec?
it’s been a hot minute. over a decade, really. camp & i don’t exactly go hand in hand but i was stubborn. still am. i take quiet pride in being the first physically disabled kid in the country throwing it down in the wilderness.
i kind of hate that i grew up. that i started to forget.
or so i thought.
can you believe erin gave me all these memories back?
the heat of a campfire, sweaty bare shoulders pressed together, singalongs floating on a breeze. musty a-frame cabins, heads resting against splintery wooden beds. sliding face first into mud, kayaking across a river, shrieking down ziplines. a kind of magic once left behind.
i love how alive this book made me feel. for a moment, life has whimsy & i believe once again! all at once my bones are saturated in nostalgia & hope & melancholy & growing pains!
a difficult truth: in recent months, i rarely gravitate towards ya novels. ya is, & will always be, my forever home which makes it all the more terrifying to realize i’m straying from a path of comfort & familiarity. i’m changing, wrapped in unease.
juliette reflected some of this at me. the euphoria of finding something special & wholeheartedly Yours. how precious the family you forge through it is. the bittersweetness of loving that something so deeply you never want to let go but knowing some day, you’ll have to. the grief of not understanding who you are outside of it.
i hold tightly to the thought that for as long as this book–erin’s words–exist, then so will that quintessential ya home will. you will grow & you will stray. but you can drive for miles & miles & that home will always be there. you can change & your skin might fit differently & your features could shift but that home will always be there. & it will always recognize you whenever you feel like dropping by....more
“that's how it goes. ad infinitum. with every single person we touch, we're leaving parts of ourselves. we live through th
fuck. the love of it all.
“that's how it goes. ad infinitum. with every single person we touch, we're leaving parts of ourselves. we live through them. i thought that was bullshit and i was wrong, because it isn't. […] and you know what? i’m fucking grateful for that. it’s horrible, but i’m grateful.”
in order to talk about how close family meal hits to home, we have to go back to december.
there’s a certain grief to having someone stroll into you life, completely alter it, & how acutely you feel that hollowness between your ribs when they leave (what kind of queer kid experience—)
that was december for me, when i met someone important from my past. someone who rewrote chapters of life when maybe i was just a footnote in hers. every single time i read a bryan washington novel, she is who i think of. as fate would have it, i met her right when i read family meal.
till today, i quietly carry parts of her with me. in particular, the way she uses food as a love language: have you eaten? do you want more food? i made you breakfast. i went to a party & the cake was really good so i brought home a slice for you.
there’s plenty of grief & ghosts in family meal. it’s a bryan washington novel after all. it asks what happens when the love of your life becomes the loss of your life. the heart of family meal, however, is how we show a love that persists through the grief. the love that carries on. the nuances of it all.
one of my favorite things about humanity is how we weave so much of our i love yous into our actions: waking up earlier & staying up late just to send a smidge more time together. text me when you get home safe. that made me think of you.
family meal is full of it.
there’s also the stilted, choppy words, the breaks, everything in washington’s novels that should cause discomfort & yet here i am, comfort in the chaos. comfort in the mess. because i know this ruin.
it echoes sentiments that i hold close, that i let myself find solace in: how i give pieces of myself to people, how i am pieces of everyone i have ever loved. how i believe love is a tangible thing. because we exist.
did i build a life around bryan washington’s words or did it build a life around me?...more