Real Life by Brandon Taylor

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In contrast to rattling through Ragnar Jónasson this had to be a slower read as the emotional intensity was almost overwhelming.

Taylor writes about anxiety and depression with raw authenticity – and the intersection of race and sexuality which seems to box Wallace in, even within the purportedly liberal environment of a post-grad community, is portrayed with both a subtly and a punch that is profoundly unsettling.

How Wallace and Miller ache for each other, seem to struggle to know how to be with each other, how Wallace makes things harder than they maybe need to be speaks to the reality of relationships – two quotes capture different parts of this for me…

“But there is a difference between entering someone, being in someone, and being with that person. There is an impossibility to the idea of simultaneously existing within them and beside them, the fact that when you get close enough to someone, you cease to be discrete entities and instead become a single surface, glittering in the sun.” (p102)

“What he was about to say was that such a display would have felt vulgar in a way, that to make so gross a statement about his feelings, or his attitude, seemed too direct, too intrusive. 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.” (p306)

How hard it is to like, or love, someone else when you are not really able to like yourself. You can’t imagine that they are genuine in their feelings for you, when you feel yourself so completely unlovable.

The punch about white privilege

“’No one said anything to him; no one did anything.’

‘I wanted to, but then, I guess, I chickened out.’

Wallace pauses, still in Miller’s arms. There will always be this moment. 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 a punch that hurts, because it is so true – which of us white people can really put hand on heart and say we have never done that, excused ourselves that it is someone else’s fight?

But it is also the way that it is a drip drip drip that is always there – hard for Wallace to call out, because individual situations are not, taken in isolation, extreme and get dismissed as him being oversensitive but seen in the round the pattern is clear.

The way that loneliness and anxiety can sometimes make you self-destructive is given voice by Taylor and I think it is this that makes this a powerful and important story for people to hear.