We Are Totally Normal

(I was tempted to title this post "Love in the Time of Coronavirus", but a Google search instantly established that, uh, it's been done.)

As I keep muttering to myself while pacing back and forth in my living room, "The government-mandated shelter-in-place order is a great opportunity to get caught up on reading!" My main reading project at the moment is my long-anticipated "Capital and Ideology". Thanks to the indefinite closure of the county library system, it looks like I may end up having three months or so to make my way through this 1000+ page tome. Unfortunately, it isn't exactly light reading. One of countless ironies of this period is that while I feel like I ought to have plenty of time to read things, my actual attention span has been badly fragmented, so wending my way through thousands of years' worth of interwoven economic, social and political history is, uh, taking a while.

Which is one of many reasons why I was relieved when my pre-ordered copy of We Are Totally Normal landed in my mailbox last week. This young-adult novel weighs in at a much more palatable 200+ pages, and its tales of high-school drama and early loves are resonating a lot more with me now than the evolution of trifunctional societies.

 

 

As with Naomi's earlier book, Enter Title Here, WATN did a great job at transporting me back to my own high-school years and remembering long-forgotten details of that era. Where ETH mostly took place within the academic year and focused on classes and grades and college applications, WATN is almost entirely about the social life outside of school: the parties and friend groups and rumors and chats. One of many things that WATN nails is how much of high school socializing is waiting for people to show up: hearing that someone is on their way, hanging out with others by a car, talking about what you're going to do once they finally get there.

MINI SPOILERS

WATN is primarily a love story, but it's also deeply about popularity, in much the same way ETH was about success.  The book is a great, constant reminder that the concept of popularity is very subjective and depends on the eye of the beholder. In the early pages of this book, I thought of the protagonist Nandan as an introvert, mostly because he's following Pothan and Ken and being literally and figuratively driven by their goals. But, in his later conversations with Dave and others outside of his primary social circle, we quickly learn that he's actually on the popular side of the school: lots of other people like and admire him and want to be around him.

Throughout the whole book, Nandan has a singular focus on power and control, seeing almost every social interaction as a dominance hierarchy. Particularly in the back third or so of the story, he thinks a lot about who has power, how it's used, how it flows over the course of a night. As badly as he wants love, he seems to want power even more. One of the lowest emotional points in the book comes when someone (I think Avani?) tells him "You're not a leader" after he goes swimming in the lake and discovers that nobody followed him. This seems much more devastating to him than the romantic and sexual obstacles he encounters, which he tends to take more in stride, as opposed to his bitter fixation on whether people like Avani see him as important.

This whole concept is pretty foreign and fascinating to me! Unlike a lot of the other dynamics in this book, I have no memory of thinking that way in high school, of categorizing people into hierarchies and worrying about my place in that structure. I do think I was very fortunate to have a stable and drama-free group of friends, though; my experience was probably more like Mari's, and I get the feeling Mari is also baffled at how Nandan sees the world. It is intriguing to think that there's this whole elaborate, high-stakes fraught political game being played immediately adjacent to people who have no idea that it exists and wouldn't care about it if they knew.

While I can't directly relate to the game, though, I hugely enjoyed reading about it. There's a large number of characters making up The Ninety-Nine and other social factions in Nandan's high-school world, and each of them are vividly and crisply defined. You get a really good sense of who each person is, how they fit into this org chart, and can swiftly get caught up in their drama: so-and-so was childhood friends with her, then they drifted apart, but still want to be friends, but it's hard because she doesn't like her girlfriend, and so on.

Oh! Have I mentioned yet that this is a gay romance novel? It is!

I keep wanting to describe the story as "sweet", and compared to ETH it is, but "sweet" isn't quite the right word for it. It is really cute to read about Nandan crushing on Dave, picking up on the signals being returned, navigating the joys and awkwardness of a new relationship. But it isn't an unfettered joy, and the way the story focuses on Nandan's internal obstacles rather than external roadblocks makes this an occasionally moody, often raw romance.

MEGA SPOILERS

I have to admit that I don't have much experience with the romance novel genre, either gay or het, so I can't easily compare WATN to other books. Reading through it, though, I was reminded of how quickly the #discourse on sexuality has changed within my lifetime. I grew up not knowing what the word "gay" meant, thinking it was just a bad word used to taunt people. I didn't personally know any gay people until I was... maybe sixteen or seventeen years old. Soon after I became an adult, the push for gay civil rights entered the mainstream political conversation, led by a "We're born this way!" push that aligned sexuality with race: it was presented as an immutable and unchangeable element, as ludicrous to deny as denying the color of someone's skin. That presentation may have helped the startlingly quick legal triumphs in courts and then in legislatures to enshrine recognition and rights for gay relationships. But today that sense of immutability is itself rejected within the movement on the left: we embrace fluidity, question rigid categorization, and look at "They're born that way!" as an embarrassing anachronism that denies people their agency and freedom.

All that being said, I think WATN is a perfect novel for the present moment. I think that in an earlier generation the act of being gay itself would be radical and exciting, plenty of drama to drive a story on its own. The stereotypical queer pop-culture story goes like "Guy doesn't feel like he fits in, then discovers that he's gay, and then everything makes sense and is better, the end." I think we've seen lots of stories where people question their straight sexuality and it leads them into discovering that they're gay, and I personally have never seen a portraying of someone questioning their gay identity after they've come out. Nandan is buzzing with uncertainty and doubt. At every stage of his relationship with Dave he questions himself: Why am I not more excited? Should this feel better? Is it me, or us? This is coupled with an occasional level of self-disgust: he feels like he's coated in an oily sheen, or becomes uncomfortably aware of what their tongues are doing, which in turn causes him to wonder if maybe he's actually straight after all.

But this story isn't undercutting or denying queerness, at all. These are all deeply human experiences. Being a teenager, being full of hormones, reconciling your lived experiences with the frameworks you've learned through culture, desperately wanting an ideal and receiving reality instead: of course that's at least as difficult for queer kids to navigate through as straight kids! It's a journey for everyone, and some details may be different for different people, but we don't come out knowing all the answers, and even if we somehow did, those answers can change over time as we and our circumstances change. And that's fine. Well, "fine". It's often stressful and confusing. But also exciting and liberating and a huge part of what makes us human.

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A few final random thoughts:

This was probably my favorite passage:

He just wanted to be loved. Or not even that. Actually that's the crazy thing - it's hard to feel loved. What really feels good is when somebody else is willing to accept your love. He was walking around with all this love in his pockets and nobody to spend it on.

That really resonates with me. Nandan can sometimes get so caught up in his capers and schemes that he doesn't see what's in front of him, but he can also be incredibly perceptive and empathetic.

I don't read many YA novels, and I'm not sure how much of the youth dialogue is from how kids today actually talk, and how much is based on what they read. The word that keeps giving me pause is "LOL". Do people actually say "Ell oh ell" now? Or "Loll"? Or is it an idiomatic replacement for "He laughed," much as earlier generations of novels might have written "Ha!"? I am a dinosaur.

There is really awesome, specific grounding in the Bay Area. More specifically in the stretch around Los Gatos and along Highway 17 into Santa Cruz. I used to live and work in that area, and I loved all the accurate details that get mentioned in passing like the crashed cars off of Skyline. Stuff like this isn't explained within the book but is instantly recognizable to locals, and wonderfully connects the novel to our time and place.

Overall I think that We Are Totally Normal is a warmer and more heartfelt book than Enter Title Here. ETH had a more shocking and outrageously funny energy, while WATN has more lovable characters. I'd like to personally spend time with most of the people in this book. And that's not just the quarantine talking!

Zerøspace

I picked up My Zero Zero based on a very brief recommendation in one of the Life Is Strange fan communities. I'm glad that I didn't know much about it going in to the book, and the few things I'd heard were sufficient to sell me: that it had some similarities to the game, in particular the core relationship between the two leads.

MINI SPOILERS

I can definitely see quite a few parallels. For starters, both the game and the book tackle mental illness. Different forms of it (depression in LiS, bipolar disorder in MYZ), and it affects the characters and stories in different ways, but both do a great job of treating it seriously and humanizing the people suffering from the illness.

Some of the characters line up pretty cleanly as well. I didn't get much of a Max/Chloe vibe from Lauren, but I thought that Blake's dad seemed a lot like William. And Cyd really reminded me of Dana. Even if the individual characters didn't have clear parallels, the overall ethos felt very familiar: creative, artsy high-school-age girls navigating stressful relationships and their own futures. No supernatural time-travel here, but they don't really need it.

I did find the game rekindling my own memories of school, even more so than LiS. A small part of this was due to the setting, growing up in Minnesota... there isn't a whole lot of direct regional stuff, but the way characters talked definitely felt like how real (non-stereotypical) Minnesotans talk, down to details like saying "pop" (much of the Midwest says "soda", but Minnesotans are solidly poppers). And the dynamic of school/religious/family life and the odd intersections of it, while not a major part of this book, felt very familiar.

The transition from the outlying areas to the cities felt familiar as well. Duluth isn't a suburb, but also isn't densely urban. My family left Minnesota before I was old enough to spend much solo time in the Twin Cities, but I had similar experiences of urbanization: the sensation of being overwhelmed but also exhilarated was formative to my evolution from a suburbanite into an enthusiastic city-dweller. You have a very vague sense of "The Cities" when growing up, but can't really understand how day-to-day life feels there until you're living in it. Lauren is in the early stages of that transition, but you can see that the spark has been struck, and she clearly wants to spend the rest of her life living in the city.

I didn't particularly identify with any one of the characters, but I was really struck by a couple of elements of Blake. I had a hard time understanding her at first, in particular her obsession with infinities, where I had a hard time tracking what she was saying and what she meant. Then, after some reflection, I realized that the sensations she was describing felt exactly like how I felt about eternity when I was a kid: the sensation of drowning, of fear, of desire and hopelessness bound together. That's something I never really resolved, just kind of got used to ignoring, but re-reading Blake and Laurens' thoughts brought it back again, which was really cool. It also made me think about infinity and eternity in general... I've never really compared them before, but they're kind of the same concept, perhaps with infinity existing in the third dimension and eternity in the fourth. The idea of "orders of infinity" is fascinating as well, makes intuitive sense to me, and caused me to think about applying that concept to eternity.

I'll try to wrap up this thread of "Things In This Book Reminded Me Of Myself" with one last element, the collaborative story. I'd completely forgotten about it, but a similar project formed a major part of my junior high school years: an ongoing serialized comic that a few friends and I passed around, gradually developing a sprawling plot with its own mythology. We had similar senses of ownership over the characters in it, although in our case we also directly appeared in it as well. Like the version in this book, ours was a "Multiverse", and we explicitly shifted between various dimensions and realities as the story demanded. Anyways, seeing that pop up in the book made me wonder, how common is that sort of collaborative experience in school? I don't think I've seen another portrayal of it in fiction before, and I'd always thought of it as something unique and special that we did; but I also haven't ever really talked about it before, so maybe it's fairly common and just something that people discard / forget as juvenilia?

OK SO ENOUGH ABOUT ME BACK TO THE BOOK:

Uh, I really liked it! The central characters are vivid and compelling, the ancillary characters believable and interesting, and I felt super-engaged by the storyline. The actual writing is terrific as well. There are some really funny bits in there, terrific little phrases and observations and analogies. The story gets more serious as it continues, and the writing gracefully follows that arc, showing a lot of thoughtfulness and compassion for what the characters are going through.

It was really interesting to see a romance - heck, multiple romances - play out largely through the medium of instant messaging. I suppose that must be the norm now, but I don't think I've really encountered it in fiction before: I'm used to characters almost entirely advancing their relationship via meeting up in person and talking face-to-face, with perhaps the occasional 19th-century epistle for dramatic emphasis. Electronic communication really is significantly different, and I thought the book did a great job at capturing its unique rhythms and concerns. Seeing that someone is typing, and your stress level rising as you anticipate their reply. Seeing their status shift from "Online" to "Idle" and wondering what they're up to, trying to divine their physical situation from the terse digital status: did something come up? Are they avoiding the conversation? Digital communication is a form of connection, something we can draw solace and comfort from; but it's also something that's new, that we as a society haven't fully adapted to yet, and there are many other layers of uncertainty that get added when you remove non-verbal communication, facial cues, and the other elements that we're evolutionarily conditioned to use in navigating relationships. Anyways, I thought that Lauren's internal thought processes were really great at portraying how this type of connection does and does not work.

MEGA SPOILERS

This book is a romance, and also seems like a coming-of-age story, but with an interesting set of concerns. Coming-of-age books are often about the protagonist trying to determine their identity, what kind of person they want to be. In some ways, Lauren's identity is fixed before the book has even started: she realized years ago that she is a lesbian, and never wavers in her determination to get a girlfriend. Other aspects of her identity are immutable, like her Jewishness: she isn't especially enthusiastic about that, but it's an undeniable part of her. She can choose how she wants to interpret and respond to that part of her heritage, but she can't just decide to not be Jewish any more.

And then there are the parts of her identity where she knows what she wants (or doesn't want), but that are in tension. Most of this is driven by her father: will she be a dutiful daughter and wife like he wants, or a high-powered successful person like he is, or a creative person like she wants to be? She has a clear preference here, but it is a choice, and one that's very painful no matter what she chooses.

Part of becoming an adult is choosing, but another part is recognizing: discovering what kind of person you are. This is the plot element that probably comes up the latest, but it's very compelling, as Lauren reflects on her actions and her relations, trying to figure herself out. Is she cold? Is she a bad girlfriend? Is she trustworthy? These questions have a lot to do with interpretation, of self-reflection. You can sense Lauren growing much more mature as she wrestles with these aspects of her identity.

The major event that sets off this introspection is her breakup with Sierra. I was really impressed by how that plot evolved. On the one hand, the deterioration of her relationship with Sierra feels really abrupt and surprising: it seems like stuff is going so well, then Lauren gets together with Blake, and all of a sudden their love curdles. But, looking back over it, I think the author did a great job at setting this up: there are tons of little clues and signs all along that Sierra is bad news, Lauren is just too giddy and smitten to pick up on them. Stuff like how she's completely oblivious about and uncurious about Lauren't Jewish faith and her not-quite-kosher diet, for example: that doesn't make much of an impression at first, it's something you can just chalk up to Sierra being slightly spacey, but in eventually fits into a significant pattern of her narcissism.

Even though I, as a reader, was completely on Lauren's side throughout the tribulation, I thought her self-flagellation was very understandable... she didn't deserve any of her treatment, but of course someone in that situation would question herself and look to her own shortcomings in trying to make sense of everything that had happened.

I'm really glad that stuff worked out! It's interesting that the passionate connection came so early, and the book ends with a stronger focus on intimacy and commitment. I feel slightly concerned in the big picture for the two of them - while Lauren's dad is wrong about most stuff, he's right that it's difficult to make it in the world under those circumstances. But in the small picture, I'm so happy for the two of them, and I think these two not-quite-perfect people are perfect for each other.

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Yeah... good book! While I hadn't intended it this way, it's also kind of whetting my appetite for the new Life Is Strange expansion that drops on Thursday. Much like LiS, I can see myself continuing to mull over this book and root for its characters long after finishing.

Post Review Here

My friend Naomi Kanakia has published her first novel, and it's fantastic! I grabbed Enter Title Here shortly after its release, and devoured it over the course of a few days. It was really funny, and gripping, with a propulsive plot narrated by a Machiavellian eighteen-year-old over-achiever.

I've enjoyed reading Naomi's short stories for a few years. She's written some terrific science-fiction pieces before, but lately has been veering in a more literary direction. My favorite one is probably a terrific and odd story about ghosts and the East Bay rental market. I wasn't sure what to expect with Enter Title Here, and was glad to go into it cold.

MINI SPOILERS

The novel is consistently funny throughout. In one early scene, Aakash asks Reshma out via text message; when she accepts, he writes back "OMG, everyone! She said yes! #CrushedIt #TotalVictory #ThanksForAllTheFish", following it up shortly after with "Um, that was meant for someone else." I actually laughed out loud during the commute on BART - embarrassing, but well deserved!

Aakash in general was one of my favorite parts of the book. He crowd-sources all of his romantic ideas, researches kissing on YouTube, and generally approaches life as a puzzle to be solved. He was funny, but also weirdly relatable, and a couple of times I caught myself thinking, "Dang, I wish I'd thought of doing that." Like many of the characters, he can be a really decent guy and has a lot going on inside his head; but Reshma doesn't care about the aspects that do not directly affect her own ambitions.

The most noteworthy aspect of the novel is probably its fun meta-fictional structure. It's narrated in the first person by Reshma, who is writing a novel. So we're getting her description of events, but also her opinions on those events, and her running commentary on how she can reshape and mold this narrative to (1) cast herself in the best light, and (2) use it as a tool to get into Stanford. That's already great, but it's further elevated in the scenes with her psychologist, who not-so-secretly dreams of publishing his mystery novels. These scenes, with Reshma and her psychologist arguing over whether she should murder someone in order to provide more dramatic tension to the final act of the book, were some of my favorites; besides being funny, though, the self-awareness elevated this (for me) from being "just" a really well-written YA novel into something more literary.

I loved all of the sign-posting and telegraphing, which occur frequently in Reshma's commentary but are densest in those "workshopping" scenes with Dr. Wasserman. They often anticipate upcoming plot developments, or provide commentary on the story we've been reading so far. Near the midpoint of the novel, Reshma is convinced that she's nearing the end (since the Stanford application date is approaching), while Wasserman argues for the need for a complication - the "third option" that will surprise readers but satisfy them as they reach the end of the novel. Of course, we have a ways left to go, and Wasserman (despite being a bad writer) is correct here. There's also really fun ongoing discussion about how likeable/relatable/well-drawn the characters are. Reshma keeps trying to find succinct and clear motivations and actions for the people in her life so they can fulfill their necessary roles. Near the very end of the book, she finally kind of gives up, and acknowledges that the real complexity of people is greater than the simplified version that a novel demands. "Maybe the problem is that I'm trying to slap an ending onto a friendship that only began like six months ago." This stuff can be enjoyed on so many levels: for Reshma herself, for the story Reshma's writing, and for the novel we're reading.

Reshma has been shaped by the hothouse environment of Silicon Valley, and the novel does a great job at grounding itself in the weird environment here. The startup scene is just a background to the main plot, but everything about it feels correct: in particular, "Bombr" is a perfect name for a new social networking platform, right in step with Twitter and Tumblr and Flickr. Las Vacas itself is made up, but is obviously a stand-in for Atherton or Menlo Park or another of those mid-Peninsula wealthy, highly-educated, intensely-competitive cities.

The high school scenes themselves were really engaging and brought me back in mind to my own high-school experiences. I was fortunate enough to have a stronger social circle than Reshma, but I remember being keenly aware of the importance of group connections and social standings. All of the plot about GPA also rang immediately true for me - my high school was fairly similar, in that we had classes that were either "R" (supposedly "Regular" but de-facto "Remedial"), "I" (for "Intermediate", or standard) and "A" (for "Advanced"), with each tier getting 1 point higher in GPA calculations. There were people who, like Reshma, successfully gamed the system and figured out how to get the most "A" and the fewest "I" courses. As with Reshma, those weren't the smartest kids: in my particular class, most of the smartest kids were in band, which hobbled all of them with an extra "I" for a total of 8 semesters. I made out a little better since I wasn't in band, but I did take two computer science courses that, inexplicably, were "I" levels as well. But we all liked the material enough that we were fine being in the top 10 instead of valedictorian. But I also think we, and our parents, were a lot less competitive. Some of that is probably the difference with Silicon Valley, and some of it might be high school and college getting more competitive in general since I attended.

Anyways! I almost never think about high school any more, but Enter Title Here reminded me vividly of how crucial everything felt back then: the grades, the rankings, college admissions, finding a date to Prom, having people to eat lunch with. So much of that seems unimportant now, but I'm sure it helped shape who I am today, and it was cool to reconnect with that part of my past story.

Reshma is, of course, absolutely ruthless in her climb to the top. I was really impressed at just how consistently negatively Reshma is drawn, seeming borderline sociopathic. There were quite a few times during the book when I thought "Okay, this will be the moment when Reshma will acknowledge her hubris and draw back." Nope! Inevitably, she doubles down, placing others or herself at greater risk as she claws towards her goal. These escalations often occur during her interactions with Alex, and are shockingly funny. I just love the absurdity of Reshma wielding her friendship as a sword over Alex, refusing to let her escape even when they both hate one another.

MEGA SPOILERS

After reading an entire novel painting Reshma as the most cynical and relentless person imaginable, I was even more impressed at how quickly but believably she's "redeemed" at the end. It's still recognizably her, particularly her determination and ambition (which loses focus for a time but never disappears). She hasn't lost her personality, but she's gained empathy. Or, at least, she's gained the ability to recognize when she does not have empathy, which is practically the same thing. There's a moment, late in the book, when she finally realizes that parts of George's life are pretty crappy, and actually cares about that, and not just as a means to improve her own life. It's a wholly satisfying ending that, as Dr. Wasserman promised, we didn't see coming but makes perfect sense once we see it.

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I was lucky enough to attend the launch party for the novel, which was a lot of fun - Naomi read from the book and gave a really enlightening and amusing Q&A. As she pointed out, this is a young-adult novel, but exactly zero teenagers were in attendance. I haven't been a teenager in a while, but I think many will get a kick out of this book - either because they relate to the intense competition and ambition, or because they can be grateful they have escaped it. I do know that I, as an adult, thoroughly enjoyed it. From the gripping, charismatic-yet-sometimes-horrifying characters to the really clever story construction and self-commentary, this was a terrific read, and one that I can unhesitatingly recommend to anyone.