The last time I read a book with characters and events that were so incessantly relevant to my own, it was Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life. So much so, that I wrote about it while interlinking the instances to what was happening in my own life three fucking times (here, here, and here). Very few people understood why--and that's because it is very personal to me that I don't share it with everyone. Jude St. Francis, in all of his imperfections, is basically me.
Come 2019, I was introduced to this book that again, everyone I find interesting was talking about:
Now, I would assume that you would have read at least some reviews about this book--self research, everyone!--so let me just get down to business here:
I gave the book a 4/5 star on Goodreads, because DEAR GOD I'M FURIOUS AT THESE CHARACTERS.
My guess is part of the reason why this book is so wildly popular, especially with millennials living in major cities is the fact that it really does resonate with how we live our lives these days. This is a book about being young and messing up our own lives, whether or not it was intentional. Life offers up a series of opportunities, and a lot of the times we were bound to miss them. These missed opportunities, either by choice or circumstance, are most likely due to the bad choices. The bad choices that we would usually regret... sometimes for a moment, or for years.
Marianne and Connell are the main characters who committed the most regrettable bad choices, up to the point that I feel like they were sabotaging themselves. These are two people who chose to be in an unnamed, complex relationship and stubbornly making the conscious decision to remain so (FOR YEARS) even though it was very obvious that they are the ones getting hurt. They were in complete control of their own lives... if we are not to consider that they are most likely fuck up to their brains.
It was obvious to everyone that Connell loves Marianne and vice versa. All that Marianne had been doing is trying to protect herself from getting hurt in case Connell's fucked up mind decides that he will say otherwise. This self-protection, this fear of being rejected, is what makes Marianne sees herself as cold, distant, as if there is something unlovable about her. For someone like Marianne, when someone seems to love her in the way that love is conventionally supposed to be, something is not right. She doesn't know what to do with it. Then she would find ways to fuck things up--her interest in being choked, for example. Her absolute refusal to acknowledge that he and Connell could have the life they both secretly wanted if she wasn't so buttheaded about the state of their relationship.
Is it all Marianne's fault though? Maybe not. I just happen to be all too familiar with the way that she handles her life and relationships. This is the girl who, even as they lay intermingled in bed post-coitus, told her long-time "friend" that it felt different with you, it wasn't like this with anyone else, and then got back to not fully recognizing what it is that is happening between them. Their chemistry isn't just something that only other people could see from outside, but also something that they can't deny from the inside. So why in the hell is she doing this to herself?
Because for people who deem themselves unlovable, love is a foreign feeling in which they don't feel safe.
