Mike’s review
I’ve been thinking about meaning and purpose and blah blah blah a lot lately. I suppose this review blog is my legacy since I won’t be having children if I can help it. So, some depressive anxious person in the future: here you go, you’ll probably like this book. It’s right up your alley. Touches all the hot point for you. Most of the stories are about an only semi-coded version of the author. Wortman’s surrogates are all anxious depressives who treat staying in bed for months and then going on binges of self-harmful behavior like it’s totally normal, of course I do that, doesn’t everyone?
The matter of factness of the depressive language is amazing. Wortman shows what it’s like to be in the depths of a depression without it feeling wrought, which is a very hard thing to do.
“Love You. Bye.” captures exactly what it means to have such little sense of self that you’re willing to throw your entire self into another person because they acknowledge your existence.
“What Family Does” does this as well, but adds in a shitty townie dirtbag and a legacy of a family that exists for its own sake. Marc Maron always says he grew up around his parents and that’s a decent description of this family. The protagonists parents don’t really parent the protagonist, but they are there.
Wortman blurs the lines of fiction and reality in most of the stories and then doubles down on blurring those lines in a super postmodern way that seems annoying at first, but then she sticks with the bit hard enough that it brings it back around in “Which Truth, Patricia?” I don’t want to spoil the magic there, but I started reading that one and was like, “Oh, at least there’s one story here I don’t immediately love. Actually, this is kind of annoying.” And then I ended up adoring it, like every other story in this book.
Themes, characters and events cross into different stories even though the characters are “different,” or at least have different names, which adds to the everyone here is really a surrogate for Wortman herself aspect.
I loved all these stories. Everything felt very real and authentic, which really just means these stories felt like they could be from my life. They seem real to me because I’m on the verge always of being this much of an anxious depressive.
The Heart of Literature 