Gray

James Montgomery, Pete Wentz — 2013

Sometimes, late at night in the hotel room, after the lights have gone out and the mistakes have already been made, when it is heavy and silent and still, I lie awake and listen to my pulse on the pillow… Imagine you are on a tour bus, the miles whistling away beneath you as you sleep. Tomorrow you will wake up in downtown Somewhere. It doesn’t matter. All the skylines look the same. Time is only marked by events. The world is on a first-name basis with you. But you…you barely even know yourself. There are those who give in completely to the idea of what it means to be famous. And those who can’t ever seem to leave the past behind. Life is a deep and contemplative story stuck on repeat—love, loss, self-destruction, self-discovery. If you could go back to the way things were before you made it…would everything still be gray?

Reviews

Lis@seagull

Mar 16, 2022

Sometimes I just look at this book and think about Jeanae and wonder what it feels like to have an entire book written about a trainwreck of a relationship with someone bitter enough to write a book about it 8 years after it ended. Oh man. Maybe it was based on Ashlee or something, but since its set around the time TTTYG/FUCT comes out, I'm pretty sure it's Jeanae. Dang. That's a lot of bitterness. But it's manifested itself in okay writing, so there's that. I think of this as something reminiscent of Palahniuk, with less concentration on the physically jarring aspects of his stories and more about the mental side. More antidepressants. More pill-popping. More visits to a sorely needed psychiatrist. Ah, well. It was fiction, so I don't know how much of it actually happened in real life (Jenae didn't really (view spoiler)[die in real life (hide spoiler)] Does it count as fanfiction if it's written by the guy himself?

Bryanna Leigh@bryannaleigh

Nov 18, 2021

Gray... Is simply gray. Some may like it, se will hate it. I am in the latter. As a FOB fan, I was excited for this release, and was disappointed. The writing itself was great, when you got past overused plots, dull, stereotypical characters and, oh, the same thing happening throughout the book. I'm also not entirely sure that the whole thing is completely fictional, as his original story was supposed to be a biography. The line of truth and fiction is a bit thin, but the only things that focused on are "I" and "Her", with not much development across them. There is a lot of potential for this story, but it didn't make it. For me, the ending almost felt like it was rushed just to get it published and over with. Also, it didn't feel like it was completed, which might be a part of the "getting it done" thing. Honestly, I feel like Pete came across the document one day, decided to slap an ending onto it and call it a day.

Zach Spencer@ghostzach

Sep 11, 2021

I spent too much time putting off reading this book. There is a lot of sadness, sense of losing oneself to mental illness and despair in the story. Overall it was a great journey, I had a hard time putting the book down because I was committed to the insanity of it all, needing to know what was next. You never learn the main characters name, or Her name, but it I think it's beautiful that way. I'd compare this to a young rock stars version of The Perks of Being a Wallflower.