Ally > Recent Status Updates

My initial impression of January LaVoy's narrator voice is positive, but the audio setup is busted in a way I can't quite put my finger on - there's a bunch of extra bass that indicates maybe some wind past the mic and some treble noise that maybe is an artifact of excessive compression? It's not a standard mistake I know the sound of but something is weird.

Aside from a couple of frustrated maudlin affairs with straight girls in my adolescence, I had only ever dated women who looked like boys. First I had gone from the dreamy, long-skirted, messy-haired girl to the pony-tailed high-school jock, and then the androgynous downtown college hipster, all the way to the androgynous downtown hipster transgender boy, female-to-male.

[ew the narcissism]

I needed money before I could make that call [to the dealer]. In fact, I needed money for more than that. Life in New York cost more than it had in Boston, from subway fares to food. I only accepted the bare minimum from my parents…

[ok I think that phrase is a dealbreaker - can anyone who writes that understand the world?]

If that great red-walled room was a womb, I was its heart.

[huh? like the heart of an embryo? or like a really really dangerous internal hernia?]

"This wall between us! We all call it that [the c*ck blockade]." She smacks the palm of her hand against the brick wall. Yet another word I don't know.

[uhhhh which word of that two word phrase is the one our narrator doesn't know?]

Both ["accidental" arsons] were a result of her angrily monologuing about Valentine's strictness and chucking around sparklers that she snuck into camp. Since she's upset now, I need to assess that anger on a range from tree arson to whole-planet arson before I tell her the entire story.

[erggggg prose agggghhhh]

A few parents and students passing through the wall's gate stare at Delilah's palpable dark aura the longer she emanates her fury.

[ok this sentence is strike two]

"You paid for a single room!" she says, raising her bumpy nose at me, the only physical similarity we share as best friends.

[ok, this sentence, what? does the author mean *wrinkling* her nose? does the author expect friends to look related? does the author really want the very first thing our narrator calls attention to about a character, indicating how the narrator sees the world, to be her nose bump?]

[uggggggh flipped to the audiobook - where do these narrators come from? is it all revenge for not being cast in their high school plays because of their overacting?]

https://archive.org/details/livingwit...

oh my god oh my god what have I done why did I ever think I could sing, why did I ever think I could be seen, be known

[oof this is more disemboweling than anything involving knives]

That should be enough.

[omg damn that page turn is brutally timed?]

[I usually love the presentation of LittlePuss’s books, but the gutters on this one are too small - I’ve creased the binding after like two pages - and the typeface is really awkward (intentionally so according to the end note? I hate that)]

...she'd insisted that because I was tall, everything looked shorter on me than on other girls, and while she was very likely right, I'd always so desperately wanted to be allowed to dress like the other girls... which is probably why I still style myself... like a 1990s animated Nickelodeon teenager.

[LET ME AUDITION FOR THIS ROLE I HAVE IT IN THE BAG FOLKS]

Rom-coms aren't simple humorous stories about two people falling in love. They're all, in essence, about people who become better versions of themselves in the course of falling in love.

[um... like, you mean, there are characters with character arcs?

and... Josh-but-not-too-proud-to-work is growth, but is Ari-but-married-to-money growth? The growth must be 'less avoidant to Josh' but maybe Josh should be avoided!]

Something under her skin thrums.

"You have three minutes until your breakfast burns," he mutters, resting her legs on his shoulders.

Eight minutes later, Ari bites into matzo brei that's completely charred. She doesn't mind one bit.

[OK, so the victory sex lasts... six minutes and change? oh hooray!]

His mind feels blank, like there's a blinking cursor waiting for a line of code.

[ah yes, the post-nut bash prompt WHAT IS WITH THE SIMILES IN THIS BOOK]

"I know, I feel you, you're so close."

[this would immediately kill the vibe for me]

"We fit together. We literally fit together."

[& this, yikes]

"We're so good for each other."

[on a first time. yep, heck no.

I don't need romance characters to be like me or be my type, banter that would put me off can be fine... but a sex scene that wouldn't do it for me casts a shadow over the book - why is that?]

"You feel so good," she whispers. "God, you feel so good." Her vocabulary is also operating at a first-grade level.

[NO, JESUS, DO NOT PUT THE WORD "FIRST-GRADE" ON THE SAME PAGE AS PENETRATION. And I thought the "burst of serotonin" / "pleasure centers of the brain light up like neon" prose was a vibe killer.]

There's this idea of her that exists in his mind, where she's some kind of enigma, where the passcodes are always off by one number, where she almost opens up, but not quite. [...] Josh is good at memorizing these things.

[I understand what this is aiming at, intense attention + competence is a hot fantasy, but in my actual life it's very not hot when someone treats my orgasm as a puzzle - turned off by this]

“Stand clear of the closing doors, please”

[aha! trans rep!]

But when Josh finally emerges from the back, there’s a contemplative look on his face, like he’s trying to crack Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.

[the simile references in this book are utterly bizarre choices - does anyone in this scene care about math? WTH was the Mario/Luigi simile a chapter ago?]

He can't quite feel the beat, but he can feel her breathing.

[oh great, he can't even dance]

"You're the only person I'm nice to. If you weren't around, I'd have no redeeming qualities."

[true. so far this is successfully hitting all the notes of 80s/90s rom-coms including that the girl could do sooooo much better than this schlub.]

...an affirmation. A mantra from one of Cass's self-help books.

[ok, oops, Cass is just cis and tall, us selling self-help books is just too implausible]

...Cass asks in her sexy, husky voice. She sounds like an old-school country singer that's had too much whiskey and too many cigarettes.

[um... tall Brooklyn loft party queer theory adjunct that 'looks like someone from a prestige drama' is which tgirl exactly?]

"The Symposium? Aristophanes' speech?"

[we shall forgive that narrator Kristen DiMercurio can't say Aristophanes right... but also this was done way better in The Half of It, which Kate Goldbeck cannot have missed. This is almost as contrived as the haha leftist girl sequence that led here.]

[oh, god, our lead is an improv comedian / street canvasser? I kind of love how hard Goldbeck is working to make me hate Ari.]

The idea of a trans woman is always easier to stomach than the actual transsexual herself, what with all her wants and needs, however inconvenient they might be. The idea of her, however, can be anything you want it to be. A legacy to celebrate. A walking broken window. She's got more faces than Janus and more forms than Meredith Brooks.