Real Life

Real Life is a campus coming-of-age story that follows Wallace, a black, queer biochemistry PhD student originally from the South, and a brief cross-section of his life as a grad student at a nondescript Midwestern university. His life is one of real and imposed isolation in what feels like purgatory between the trauma of his childhood and the unknowable expanses of the life that follows grad school.

The way the author portrays the micro aggressions Wallace faces over such a short period of time is as heartbreaking as it is frustrating, infuriating even. As someone who rarely, if ever, experiences that, it's a painful window into an accumulation of hurts. The perfunctory nature of Wallace's day, a head-down feeling, is stippled with big metaphysical dreads, and a beautifully-written but absolutely horrific unveiling of survived trauma.

I thought the book was wonderfully written and an exercise in empathy for what it's like to have a marginalized identity in academia.

This novel is bleak. I did not enjoy reading this book and I hated every single character. And I wouldn't really recommend it, given how heavy and ugly the story is. But it also resonated and felt deeply true in that way that way that only fiction can. I'm having a hard time sorting out my feelings about my life from my feelings about the book and the one to five star rating system just doesn't really translate for me here.

It's a campus novel, Brandon Taylor's debut whipped up in just under 5 weeks - less created and more exhumed from his memories of being a young, gay, black man in a sciences PhD program at a midwestern university. An institute of higher learning, bastion of progressive politics, cherishing notions of inclusion and gesturing broadly to their own wokeness — that is also SUPER white. Like students sailing in their off hours white. And it's here under the crush of accumulating micro-aggressions, in a space that holds so much sway over you and your perceived notions of what your future can hold, that we find Wallace. Dismissed, made to feel small and unseen, and yet to give voice to that isn't an option. The evasions and justifications that flare into righteous indignation from white people when confronted make it easier to just shut down and move on.

All of this is happening in an academic space that Wallace has been working towards all his life but suddenly is feeling ambivalent about. What does it mean to have second thoughts when he's so close to finishing his PhD? What even is the world outside the walls of academia?

Of course this is only a glancing way into the novel but it's what stuck with me. Otherwise I admit I found it baggy, Taylor meandering around a burgeoning relationship, interpersonal drama amongst friends, and tennis. Wallace exists within this constant thrum of anxiety, a persistent discomfort that infuses every page expanding outward. Maybe it's the perfect manifestation of where he's at, an interstitial space seeking, but never quite finding, resolution. In that sense my frustrations could instead be read as recognition of how well Taylor captures the maddening inertia of academic life.