By all accounts, Susan Choi’s novel Trust Exercise is the kind of book I should have hated. The narrators are unreliable. The author is a bit coy with us in the beginning. Another character is referred to as “the author” is the fictional author? Susan Choi? Can anyone be trusted here? Just what is going on?

I’m not entirely sure what in the hell is going on, but I do know that I loved reading this book and the further I got into it, the more it delighted me.

The book opens with Sarah and David, melodramatic 15-year-old kids made all the more dramatic by the fact that they’re theatre (never theater, says their Svengaliesque teacher Mr. Kingsley) kids at a prestigious and competitive performing arts high school in some suburb in some town in the early 80s.

Sarah and David fall in mad, passionate love for reasons only a fifteen year old can understand, mostly because they get each other’s motor running. Their relationship because fodder for gossip, grudges, and bizarre trust exercises. These exercises and the relationship have lasting repercussions though out the lives of the students and teachers.

This first part about the high school students is pretty straightforward with all the melodrama you’d expect. What Choi does so wonderfully in this part and which felt so very true to me how the teens get very upset about typical teen bullshit — who snubbed who, who made out with someone’s boyfriend, etc. — while they take the actual fucked up stuff in stride, kind of glossing over it like it’s no big deal. Sometimes it takes us years and years to realize the things that happened to us were fucked up.

Then we get to the second part and things go a little sideways. Then there’s a third part that’s even more. . . what? WHAT?

I don’t want to say too much for fear of spoiling things. Getting to these parts made my heart race a little bit and my brain whirred, “Susan Choi, you magnificent bastard!”

This is a kind of book you should read with a buddy, only so you have someone to bounce ideas and theories off of, and hoo-boy do I got some theories I’d be happy to share with you once you read this one.

The post Trust Exercise appeared first on I Will Dare.

If you are in the mood for a good cry, have I got two memoirs for you!

First is Stephanie Wittels Wachs’ Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful: A Tragicomic Memoir of Genius, Heroin, Love, and Loss, about losing her brother, Harris Wittels, to a heroin overdose. If you’re like me, you know Harris as a writer from “Parks & Rec” who also played one of the stoner animal control guys. He did a lot more in the comedy world that I was unfamiliar with, particularly the fact that he’s the person who coined the term #humblebrag.

I read this one shortly after Sister #2 & Ben announced they were selling their house and Ben and Walter were moving back to Portland. So, I was already feeling a kind of loss, which is perhaps why Wittels Wachs’ book resonated with me on such a bone-deep level.

Wittels Wachs’ memoir recounts the year after Harris’ death. From the moment she got the call that Harris’ was dead right up to the anniversary. She is all the things someone who just lost a much-loved sibling is — angry, sad, scared, unsure, curious — all of this is imbued with humor. She’s funny, like her brother. And even the parts that are just straight up heart-wrenching there’s always a funny little reprieve.

What I loved the most about the book is that throughout it she addresses Harris directly and is kinda salty with him for leaving her alone to deal with their parents. I loved that you could get a real feel for their sibling dynamic, and that made me all the sadder that she lost him.

The other memoir I read that made me snot my face off was Erin Lee Carr’s All That You Leave Behind, which chronicles life with her dad, David Carr, and her own struggles with addiction.

Disclaimer: I have a soft spot for David Carr, who died in 2015, because he once told me I write like an angel.

Carr’s memoir does not sugarcoat anything — she shows her dad how she saw him, lumps and all. They fight, they makeup, sometimes she’s a sullen brat and sometimes he’s an unreasonable hardass. They both struggle with addictions and how those addictions didn’t always make them their best selves.

But through it all you can tell Carr not only loved her dad, but she admired him as a mentor (Carr is a documentarian who made the excellent “Mommy Dead and Dearest“). What I love about this one was not just how beautifully David Carr expressed his love for his daughter, but the smart advice he gave her when it came to her career.

More than a few tears were shed in this one, especially when she talked about how she and her dad bonded through music.

Oh, and one more thing while I’m on the grief memoir train, Nora McInerny’s No Happy Endings, did not make me cry, but it did make me laugh a bunch.

The post Do You Wanna Break Your Own Heart Tonight? appeared first on I Will Dare.

I’m not sure how you spent your Saturday, but I spent mine plowing through An Anonymous Girl by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen. It was one of those books that exactly hit the spot I needed — a craving perfectly sated.

I needed something light and engrossing. I tried to shove two heavier-themed (Inheritance and An Orchestra of Minorities) books next to each other and my brain rebelled.

So I set aside An Orchestra of Minorities and dove into this yummy serving of psychological thrills with a side of murder. In this Jessica is a makeup artist with a past who weasels her way into Dr. Shield’s study on morality and ends up becoming a cog in a devious revenge scheme. Some of the twists I saw coming well before they were revealed, and some of them took me by surprise. What I liked so much about this one is that none of the characters were perfect. They were all kinda shitty which made you unsure who to side with for quite a long time.

This is a good’un, a guiltless one-night stand of a book that’s super fun while you’re in it, and won’t break your heart when you’re done.

The post Day 195 of 200: One Greedy Gulp appeared first on I Will Dare.

My wonderful former writing teacher Dale Gregory Anderson used to tell us that when it came to endings our job, as writers, was to land the plane safely. I think of this a lot whenever I’m reading fiction. As a reader I’ve had a tendency to be a dick to writers who gave me endings that displeased me. I like to believe I’ve become more forgiving, especially if I felt the plane was landed safely.

Unfortunately, Karen Thompson Walker did not land the plane safely in her new novel The Dreamers, which is a bummer. Up until the end, the book about a weird sleeping virus that strikes a small California town is an intriguing, compulsive read. We follow a bunch of loosely connected randos as they watch the town around them fall into these dream-filled, unending slumbers. It’s a little weird how complacent the town is about the virus, but I shrugged off this skepticism because I trust KTW and I was going to follow wherever she lead.

Unfortunately, she led me nowhere. The story just wanders around quietly with any tension quickly dissipated, until things peter out in an ending that made me think What? That’s a ripoff!

The post Day 180 of 200: The Dreamers Doesn’t Land the Plane Safely appeared first on I Will Dare.

Sometimes, but not often, I will struggle through a book that is challenging. The older I get the more I want to read things that are outside my taste. This rubs up against my “life is too short to read books you don’t enjoy,” because I frequently do not enjoy books outside my taste.

To wit, I tried to read two modern romance novels recently. One involved a woman who fell in love at first sight with a dude she saw at a bus stop and then who started dating her BFF. I just could not. I tried. But I didn’t care, and I didn’t buy any of it. I quit after a few chapters.

One, I did finish, was Milkman by Anna Burns. Oof. This is one that was long on concept and short on plot or character development. Oftentimes I’ll read a short story and think, that would make a great novel. The opposite is true in this case. The stream-of-conscious narration, the 18 ways to say the same thing in the same paragraph, and nicknamed characters would have been well-suited for something much shorter. Instead we get a book-length writing experiment that was completely exhausting & unenjoyable to read.

The post Day 175 of 200: Milkman was Exhausting appeared first on I Will Dare.