awful heart to song

anon i would love nothing more lol i'll try not to write a book report on it, but no promises. i hated it so much i've thought about it a LOT. i'm going to try to refrain from heavy spoilers, but there will still be some.

i also enjoyed her memoir! i thought it was witty and honest and heartbreaking. i thought her matter-of-fact way of writing really made it all feel raw and realistic to the way she was experiencing her life. it was funny and didn't pull any punches--this was her real experience, and it suuuucked.

half his age is a fiction book, but still heavily drawing on mccurdy's life. and i do mean heavily--there is a scene in the fiction book that is nearly a recreation from her memoir. it is just as blunt and straightforward as the memoir. mccurdy's voice through and through.

but in the fiction book, it just doesn't work. it has so many good ideas that it just doesn't stick the landing with. waldo is a lonely character living in alaska, and yet the alaska of it all is not even relevant. it was set in mccurdy's partner's hometown, apparently. instead of becoming a motif, it feels flung randomly and without thought. there are some really interesting scenes that draw parallels between the multiple different ways waldo self harms. she compulsively shops, she stays friends with someone that clearly looks down on her, she performs femininity the way that her mother taught her despite hating it (i think?), she pursues a relationship with her teacher. the self harm never has any consequences--despite being ostensibly "poor", waldo never seems to worry about money aside from a vague notion of "maybe i shouldn't have bought all of this." her friendship adds very little narrative or personal meaning to her life. performing femininity to the degree she does seems to buy her no social capital. no one notices the way she is using sex to harm herself. it sets up so many things and flubs them all to the point that by the end i was of the impression that mccurdy didn't set up any of them intentionally, they were just things she decided to put in when she needed another scene. none of it matters.

the book also relies heavily on shock value. i need to be very clear about where i stand on shock value--i read body horror, i read sex. hell, i read reddit stories about poop knife. i can handle uncomfortable, unsettling, and gross. it's not my favorite, but i can handle it and even enjoy it, if it has a point. the shock value paired with the complete lack of consequences was befuddling and frustrating. why do you need to detail every time your character "takes a leak"? why did we include a scene with menstrual blood sex and menstrual blood leaking onto the carpet if there are no consequences in this secret relationship?

i also have very complicated feelings about how it ends, but i won't go that far into spoilers. i'll just leave it as: it shifted me from "this isn't great" to "fuck this shit".

i don't think that authors need to "work through" everything before they're allowed to write about things that are personal to them. you can get very raw and honest accounts at any stage of "healing". mccurdy, however, needed to sit with this one a little longer. she's clearly still working through some anger about her situation, which makes sense. Unfortunately, that paired with her being a newer, less practiced writer made this book seem haphazardly thrown together and lack perspective. it's like it couldn't pick an angle. are we leaning into the self-destruction? no, apparently not. are we leaning into the consequences? no, definitely not. so what is the point? what am i supposed to walk away with?

Well I don't like how it feels. I don't feel cleaner without body hair. I don't prefer not having body hair. But who will advocate for women like me, but me? For women who do like hair removal, they are advocated for every time they step out of the house and see 99% of the female population also conforming to that standard, or when they watch a movie and see all the shaved actresses, or view an advertisment, or open a magazine, or watch a music video, or scroll through social media, or walk down the streets without receiving insults and glares for having a completely normal bodily feature.

apparently the cops arrested fuckin Bicycles Georg today

Ma-ia ho

Ma-ia ha

Alo?

sunt eu