Real Life

A Novel

De: Brandon Taylor

Narrado por: Kevin R. Free

A FINALIST for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the VCU/Cabell First Novelist Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the NYPL Young Lions Award, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award 
 
“A blistering coming of age story” —O: The Oprah Magazine

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Public Library, Vanity Fair, Elle, NPR, The Guardian, The Paris Review, Harper's Bazaar, Financial Times, Huffington Post, BBC, Shondaland, Barnes & Noble, Vulture, Thrillist, Vice, Self, Electric Literature, and Shelf Awareness

A novel of startling intimacy, violence, and mercy among friends in a Midwestern university town, from an electric new voice.

Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.  
 
Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.

Intriguing

Usually I love the readers of Audible books. This time I thought the invented voices for each character weren’t particularly great matches for their personalities. Just one straight ahead voice would have been fine and less distracting. The story was a deep dive into one character’s psyche and life experiences. It gave the listener just enough to care about him and let us fill in the missing pieces.

Beautiful

This book is beauty as pain. Written in gorgeous prose it is heartbreaking. Evokes UW in every way.

Impressions of Taylor's Real Life

This book confronts difficult realities for graduate students working equally hard on their research and personal lives. There is much pain in the lives of the characters in both settings. The hopes and dreams of youth are quickly engulfed by insecurities and brashness of new friends and sexual encounters. Finding one's self is an elusive goal, only achieved through both reflections of past family influences and what satisfies them now. Trusting the academic world is difficult and challenging; so is finding a person with whom to share daily life. The contrasts between Black, Asian and white characters are truthfully presented. Wallace and Miller begin to find satisfaction only when they acknowledge their pasts and begin to talk to each other honestly.

Heartbreaking

I was not prepared for the emotional rollercoaster that this book would take me on. It left me in tear sometimes, angry sometimes and overall just emotional. There is so many different topics going on in this book that effect so many different people. And seeing how Wallace is trying to move on from the trauma that is his life only to counter more trauma was heartbreaking. I felt like the story had a poetic flow to it and that added to the storytelling. Overall I thought it was a good Story. I do wish that the ending would have gone slightly differently.

Incisive observation of the enduring impact of entrenched racism, classism and homophobia.

Beautifully written. Sensitive and carefully wrought portrayal of one perceptive man’s lonely fight to vanquish through academic excellence. A subtle, clear-eyed examination of the enduring racism, classism and homophobia he negotiates in a graduate school setting. The book is a portrayal of his struggle (on multiple fronts) to be authentic and respected in the REAL world. “Real Life” is filled complex relationships riddled with desire, anxiety and deception along with tenderness.