Stories don't exist for my easy consumption and writing isn't there to be lacy and melt in your mouth. I think the best thing I have done for my reading, in the seven ish years it's been since I started doing it again, is really learn that protagonists aren't there for me to like them.

The water is very cold and I know I'll have to tread for a while. I am in my twenties, so instead this book made me feel OK about being in a half-baked state of existence, almost who I am and who I will be but not quite, sticking my toes into adulthood and all the grocery lists and laundry baskets that entails but refusing to submerge quite yet. Roxane Gay also said, in her review, 'I’m really glad my twenties are over.' If I wrote a version of 'These Are A Few Of My Favorite Things,' from the Sound of Music, most of those adjectives would make the cut. After all, I'M mean spirited and sad and constantly trying to convey those into a brutally smart and funny exterior, so this is right up my alley. I mean, books make me anxious often, and life makes me depressed frequently, but one piece of content doing BOTH?Įrin said that this is 'mean spirited, funny, brutally smart, and sad,' and once I saw that I immediately started reading it. This book made me feel so anxious and so depressed that it took me approximately 6 times as long as expected to finish.

I know some readers will love and have loved this kind of writing, but I've sadly never been one of them. The moment I left Clay's house, my vagina was a cunt.

When I imagine it, she is indifferent, her vagina defying all etymology, not a pussy or a twat but an abstract violence, like a Rorschach or a xenomorph. Of course, in motion, when she turns and stoops to open the oven, the geometry is weirder. She is, I suppose, sexy in the way a triangle can be sexy, the clean pivot from point A to B to C, her body and face breaking no rules, following each other in a way that is logical and curt. Things like this just read awkwardly to me: Lots of horrible things happen, but the writing kept me feeling disconnected from the story being told. Edie narrates like she's trying oh so very hard for her Creative Writing 101 class, dragging out a metaphor here and there but failing to add any real emotional pull. Some people have been favorably comparing this to Queenie, even going so far as to claim it is a better-written version, but this is really not my idea of good writing. The book is a very cold, detached account of a young woman's relationship with an older man and his wife. Luster seems to be getting rave reviews across the board, but I found the 'beautiful' and 'evocative' writing actually quite painful to read.

Luster raven