Book Review: True Love by Sarah Gerard

 

I keep reading books by and about millennials because I am one of them and I recognize myself in some of the characters, but most of the time, there is the same story told over and over again, but writers with an obvious talent but lacking some diverse sources of inspiration. 

My latest adventure in lost millennials is True Love by Sarah Gerard. Nina is a multi-tasking student of literature, succeeding in her academic encounters, but with a bad taste in men, with a disfunctional family, with a mother who is part of a polycule that she doesn´t like, who is having a lot of bad sex with men who may be or may be not in a relationship, with a co-dependency problem and paid a minimum salary, self-harming herself and refugiating in the bathroom for reading or writing her novel. Her living arrangement is mostly peculiar and even had bed bugs - although for some NYC standards it is not such a terrible news. 

´I signed up for trauma counseling because I felt something had happened to me, although I was unable to articulate a single event. Others in the group shared stories of incest, combat, rape, dead children´. She doesn´t have anything special to do, does not want to change the world - and it is not a problem with that, there is not such an existential requirement - but she is like a ghost running in the shadow of her nakedness desperate for a physical touch. Therapy is an important activity in the life of the characters, especially Nina, and after all it makes sense as we are in America, an America about to vote for Trump. An activity made mostly by default because in fact it does not seem to help too much or at all. 

The book is an ´I´-story. Nina is deciding, mostly impulsively, who will stay and what she will do with her own body. Her empathy stops where her desire starts, but in a very emotional, hormonal way. There is no grown-up restraint or second thought that maybe the other person would be affected or hurt. But mostly life is a random experience. A sad YOLO refrain which keeps repeating over and over again, with no direction, No expectations but a lot of disappointment. 

Good writing, an awesome cover, but it breaks my literary heart to have to deal with so many variations of the same character. Empty, selfish and so so so boring. Boring, that´s the key word.

Rating: 2 stars