Brandon Taylor

A novel of startling intimacy, violence, and mercy among friends in a Midwestern university town, from an electric new voice.

Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.  
 
"Real Life" is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.

A Novel

Real Life

Ausrine Blazyte

But when Wallace looks at such people, people he wants, he always feels so much worse afterward. Being so aware of their bodies makes him aware of his own body, and he becomes aware of the way his body is both a thing on the earth and a vehicle for his entire life's history. His body is both a tangible self and his depression, his anxiety, his wellness, his illness, his disordered eating, the fear of blood pouring out of him. It is both itself and not itself, image and afterimage. He

Helen 

Is this all his life is meant to be, the accumulation of other people's pain? Their assorted tragedies? 

Better to imagine his friends happy than to see their unhappiness up close. And unhappy they certainly would be hasn't it? The misery of other people, the persistence of unhappi- ness, is perhaps all that connects them. Only the prospect of greater unhappiness keeps them within the circumscribed world -that has been the lesson this weekend, of graduate school.

Perhaps friendship is really nothing but controlled cruelty. 

There is so much trouble in the world. There are people suffering everywhere, at every moment Who is happy, truly happy, ever? What is a person to do with it all? Except to try to slide laterally out of one's life into whatever gray space waits for them.

The past is greedy, always swallowing you up, always taking. If you don't hold it back, if you don't dam it up, it will spread and take and drown. The past is not a receding horizon. Rather, it advances one mo- ment at a time, marching steadily forward until it has claimed everything and we become again who we were; we become ghosts when the past catches us. I can't live as long as my past does. It's one or the other.

Storms were the only consistent church in my life, the only time I couldn't seen in from sermons or turn a blind eye to God. You can ignore a pastor's words; it is easy not to hear them. But when you see lightning flash or hear thunder crack open the sky, there is no denying God's fury, his power to break the world with very little effort. 

There will always be this moment. There will always be good white people who love him and want the best for him but who are more afraid of other white people than of letting him down. It is easier for them to let it happen and to triage the wound later than to introduce an element of the unknown into the situation. No matter how good they are, no matter how loving, they will always be complicit, a danger, a wound waiting to happen. There is no amount of loving that will ever bring Miller closer to him in this respect. There is no amount of desire. There will always remain a small space between them, a space where people like Roman will take root and say ugly, hateful things to him. It's the place in every white person's heart where their racism lives and flourishes, not some vast open plain but a small crack, which is all it takes.

Decisions were made every day about what sort of life they wanted, and they always answered the same: Only this, only this. But that was the misery of trying to become something, misery that you could put up with because it was native to the act of trying. But there are other kinds of misery, the misery that comes from other people.

The most unfair part of it, Wallace thinks, is that when you tell white people that something is racist, they hold it up to the light and try to discern if you are telling the truth. As if they can tell by the grain if something is racist or not, and they always trust their own judgment. It's unfair because white people have a vested interest in underestimating racism, its amount, its intensity, its shape, its effects. They are the fox in the henhouse. 

It wasn't the world outside that he had needed to drown out, then, but the world inside, the interior of the house, which had always seemed so much wilder and stranger to him than anything he found walking alone in the woods.

Alina

JoAnna

This is probably one of my favorite books ever! I’m so enamored with Brandon Taylor’s style. Every sentence felt interesting, even when the plot slowed. It’s incredible to me that the book takes place only over a matter of days (it’s 300+ pages!). Real Life articulates the maddening, gaslighting effects of racism incredibly well. I also loved that he explored the complicated reality behind friendship, and spoke to queer culture in a way that touched me deeply. Wallace is so absorbed in his misery and loneliness that he won’t let anyone else in. This in a way makes him selfish—and Taylor captured this with delicate nuance. What a lovely novel.

this is my first brandon taylor work, and the immediate thing i feel i have to get out is that the prose is undeniably beautiful to the point where i wondered briefly if taylor had dabbled in poetry. so many lines i felt envy and thought 'what a wonderful way to convey a thing, an idea, a moment'. what incredible detail that did not at any point feel flowery or overly ornate. 

if i try my best to describe what this novel made me feel, it's as though i'm looking at a black and white picture i know must've been taken originally in color. i know there is something that i'm missing, but if i focus and try my hardest to imagine what color goes where, i get the eerie sense that i'm looking at it all wrong. what then is left but to drain the color out and look again? 

there was a point in the book where i just felt painfully removed from what was happening, thinking 

 and suddenly when i pushed through it gave way to a mellowing i didn't quite prepare myself for. i've rarely felt so incidentally merged with a character by the end then i did with wallace. throughout it all there is so much he fails to access and as a result there is a limit to how deep we can reach into his character and dig. you as a reader are kept at a distance because wallace feels no desire to bring you closer. 

in the end, it's almost as if he reaches back. asks what does it all matter? if i told you the color of the sky, does that really change the picture? and you want to scream of course it does! give me anything! but something gives you pause, and you make it to the end and reach some kind of deep contentment that almost angers you. and isn't that a feat? what a slight of hand. what an unraveling of a reader.

tiff <3

this is my first brandon taylor work, and the immediate thing i feel i have to get out is that the prose is undeniably beautiful to the point where i wondered briefly if taylor had dabbled in poetry. so many lines i felt envy and thought 'what a wonderful way to convey a thing, an idea, a moment'. what incredible detail that did not at any point feel flowery or overly ornate. 

if i try my best to describe what this novel made me feel, it's as though i'm looking at a black and white picture i know must've been taken originally in color. i know there is something that i'm missing, but if i focus and try my hardest to imagine what color goes where, i get the eerie sense that i'm looking at it all wrong. what then is left but to drain the color out and look again? 

there was a point in the book where i just felt painfully removed from what was happening, thinking dear god this is bleak and suddenly when i pushed through it gave way to a mellowing i didn't quite prepare myself for. i've rarely felt so incidentally merged with a character by the end then i did with wallace. throughout it all there is so much he fails to access and as a result there is a limit to how deep we can reach into his character and dig. you as a reader are kept at a distance because wallace feels no desire to bring you closer. 

in the end, it's almost as if he reaches back. asks what does it all matter? if i told you the color of the sky, does that really change the picture? and you want to scream of course it does! give me anything! but something gives you pause, and you make it to the end and reach some kind of deep contentment that almost angers you. and isn't that a feat? what a slight of hand. what an unraveling of a reader.

5 stars for the impeccable craft, but the plot is heartbreaking. brandon taylor intimately weaves the world around wallace’s private wounds, and so the world shifts, is “at an angle to itself.” how these wounds ache, wring, pulsate. how it can bruise and imprison us to be unrooted, unanchored, to have a tenuous grasp. how too much of this creates a lonesome life. to be lodged between this life and the next. the chasms and cleaves between our inner world and others’. the pain of being alive, of “real life.” in his debut novel, he allowed me to uncover a riot of shapes. in many ways, this is how my life was shaped years ago. sharp and closed, it slices through, but only inward.

Alyanna

Wallace has spent his summer in the lab breeding a strain of microscopic worms. He is four years into a biochemistry degree at a lakeside Midwestern university, a life that’s a world away from his childhood in Alabama. His father died a few weeks ago, but Wallace didn’t go back for the funeral, and he hasn’t told his friends – Miller, Yngve, Cole and Emma. For reasons of self-preservation, he has become used to keeping a wary distance even from those closest to him. But, over the course of one blustery end-of-summer weekend, the destruction of his work and a series of intense confrontations force Wallace to grapple with both the trauma of the past, and the question of the future.

Deftly zooming in and out of focus, "Real Life" is a deeply affecting story about the emotional cost of reckoning with desire, and overcoming pain.

I am trying to review this without thinking about Brandon Taylor's substack piece about campus novels and this novel (

https://blgtylr.substack.com/p/tar-is-a-campus-novel-grow-up

) but it is ultimately difficult. I read the piece closer to its original posting and albeit, relatively recent, I find it very fundamental to my ideas about campus literature (or what we have aestheticised as dark / light academia) and why such novels work or do not work; it manages to capture into words something that I have struggled to formulate myself.

Even without it, though, I would like to believe that "Real Life" would have felt as as much of a refreshing breath as it did. The genre has suffered from too much aestheticisation and too little substance; too many people are more concerned with subverting it (or whatever their understanding of it is) than utilising it to tell a unique and interesting story. "Real Life", in contrast, comes with a strong sense of telling the story it wants to tell, rather than concern itself with optics.

For example, is Wallace a likeable person? Is he an unlikeable one? Who cares, he is a fleshed out and realised character. And as such, there are many layers to his story, many heavy elements of life he deals with or tries to figure out how to deal with - grief, depression, racism, homophobia. The sense of separation from the group of people who are supposed to be your friends, who are supposed to be your chosen family, in particular resonated with me as a reader. Who among us has not been crushed by the disonance of what academic life was meant to be and what it actually was? And how being an outsider can be both self-perpetuated and externally defined?

"Real Life" captures the messiness of a pivotal period of a person's life in a quiet beauty. There is sadness there but it never feels like torture; it is just what life is like.

I am trying to review this without thinking about Brandon Taylor's substack piece about campus novels and this novel (https://blgtylr.substack.com/p/tar-is-a-campus-novel-grow-up) but it is ultimately difficult. I read the piece closer to its original posting and albeit, relatively recent, I find it very fundamental to my ideas about campus literature (or what we have aestheticised as dark / light academia) and why such novels work or do not work; it manages to capture into words something that I have struggled to formulate myself.

Even without it, though, I would like to believe that "Real Life" would have felt as as much of a refreshing breath as it did. The genre has suffered from too much aestheticisation and too little substance; too many people are more concerned with subverting it (or whatever their understanding of it is) than utilising it to tell a unique and interesting story. "Real Life", in contrast, comes with a strong sense of telling the story it wants to tell, rather than concern itself with optics.

For example, is Wallace a likeable person? Is he an unlikeable one? Who cares, he is a fleshed out and realised character. And as such, there are many layers to his story, many heavy elements of life he deals with or tries to figure out how to deal with - grief, depression, racism, homophobia. The sense of separation from the group of people who are supposed to be your friends, who are supposed to be your chosen family, in particular resonated with me as a reader. Who among us has not been crushed by the disonance of what academic life was meant to be and what it actually was? And how being an outsider can be both self-perpetuated and externally defined?

"Real Life" captures the messiness of a pivotal period of a person's life in a quiet beauty. There is sadness there but it never feels like torture; it is just what life is like.

a great insight on the Black gay experience!

Simran Armstrong

Aishling

2.5/5 stars

[Trigger warnings: racial slurs, homophobic slurs, sexual assault, talk and flashbacks of past sexual abuse]

So there was parts of this book that I really enjoyed, but unfortunately overall it wasn’t that great to me. 

It reads in a way that you’re a person watching the story unfold, rather that actually living it yourself, which is how I like to experience books. It was very hard to read the tone of what people are saying, the author doesn’t describe the feelings behind a lot of the words said, and a lot of times it really confused me cause I didn’t know how the main character or the people around him were feeling. There was times when I thought people were arguing but they weren’t, and vice versa. There would be lines of back and forth dialogue with no breaks in between to explain how the person was saying it, or how someone was feeling about the words. Because of this I wasn’t sure of Wallace’s feelings on so many matters and it was hard to really connect with him over it. He was also a major pushover, people would say things to him and he’d just take it while his friends would also sit by and do nothing but give out about it afterwards. 

Towards the end I did skip a lot of pages because the author likes to go into descriptions and story’s about things that have little relevance to the current situation and even tho I enjoyed it at the start, it was annoying by the end. I feel bad cause I can see what the author was trying to do but I just feel like it wasn’t achieved. 

I thought this book was supposed to be more about Wallace suffering because of his race and sexuality, and white the racism was apparent in his work/education, but it seems more like he was surrounded by people who just assholes anyway and would still be that way even if they weren’t racist. 

This book also had an open and unsatisfying ending where nothing was resolved. I understand that maybe that was the point of the book to show the realness of the world but it felt like the book was building towards something but never got there. 

I think my feelings on this are of a personal preference, and other people might find it more enjoyable that I did. There’s a movie adaption planned for it and I’ll definitely be checking it out because I feel like a physical adaptation would add some of the missing emotional elements since we’d be able to see the actors faces and hear the tone of their voice, so I’m excited for that.

Midori Kobayashi

3.5/5stars


This too is real life, he thinks. Not merely the accumulation of tasks, thinks to be done and sorted, but also the bumping up against other lives, everyone in the world insignificant when taken and observed together.

A slice of life of a young black man who is studying in a predominately white environment in a midwestern university. The way POC deal with grief and trauma will always be something more and much deeper than most non-POC will realize. Taylor's writing was so goddamn beautiful!!! 
Although the book takes place over the course of a three-day weekend but I felt like I knew some of these characters all my life after I finished reading. 

The themes of the exploration of grief and sexuality touched upon in this book. There was a lot to relate to, and a decently thought-provoking read this was. 


  Book Trigger Warnings: Depression, Homophobic slurs, Molestation, Racial slurs

the writing was gorgeous but everyone sucked ass. i forgot the mc's name, but damn, the way this mf didn't slap up every single 'friend' in this book the moment they opened their mouth, he's better than i'll ever be. 

anarh

Taylor

This too is real life, he thinks. Not merely the accumulation of tasks, things to be done and sorted, but also the bumping up against other lives, everyone in the world insignificant when taken and observed together.

Gorgeous and violent and heartbreaking. Genuine CW for sexual assault and homophobia.

ACTUAL NETGALLEY REVIEW:
This book is gorgeously written, and tore at my heart more than once, which is what I love in literature. As a former and future grad student, the imposter syndrome is so real. I love the device of living in a character's skin for a little while, to see their life on an intimate level when everyday occurrences become a familiar plot line, no zombies or aliens or earth-shattering catastrophes necessary.

this is the kind of novel that makes me wish this site had a halfway point between 3.5 and 4 bc some books just feel like that exact middle, where it’s not about it being bad or good but a matter of yes, this is objectively a great novel and i can tell you why, but in the end, it still feels like a friend i only knew well once, when i was still too far from the person i am now, so can i really say that they know me?

i guess i’ve hesitated for so long about rating this book bc a part of me felt bad for slapping a 3.5 on it. ratings are arbitrary, etc. but also: 

 doesn’t deserve the connotations that come with that grade. i loved the prose. the characters felt like people i knew and will know, for better or for worse. many passages, i still think about almost a whole year later. and yet there’s a layer there, like a gauzy film between me and the emotion that feels accessible and mine but just not quite completely tangible. i’m trying to find less pretentious, less indefinite things to say about the precise feeling but it’s just—this is a novel i dream of writing. it is a novel that moved me, and a novel that accomplished what i want my writing to. i love brandon taylor’s work, and his words, and his relationship to craft and narrative. so i’m not sure how it can also be true that as a reader, i feel distant to the me whose heart was shattered by this novel. 

maybe there’s some self protection/compartmentalization trying its best to work with me here, and this is in fact a testament to how deeply this book reached me. either way, it’s not often that a novel highlights the line between writer me and reader me but somehow 

 has not only done that but also added depth to that division. i have been bettered by that this last year but it’s still not the sort of thing you like to be too aware of. it’s a bizarre limbo.

this is the kind of novel that makes me wish this site had a halfway point between 3.5 and 4 bc some books just feel like that exact middle, where it’s not about it being bad or good but a matter of yes, this is objectively a great novel and i can tell you why, but in the end, it still feels like a friend i only knew well once, when i was still too far from the person i am now, so can i really say that they know me?

i guess i’ve hesitated for so long about rating this book bc a part of me felt bad for slapping a 3.5 on it. ratings are arbitrary, etc. but also: real life doesn’t deserve the connotations that come with that grade. i loved the prose. the characters felt like people i knew and will know, for better or for worse. many passages, i still think about almost a whole year later. and yet there’s a layer there, like a gauzy film between me and the emotion that feels accessible and mine but just not quite completely tangible. i’m trying to find less pretentious, less indefinite things to say about the precise feeling but it’s just—this is a novel i dream of writing. it is a novel that moved me, and a novel that accomplished what i want my writing to. i love brandon taylor’s work, and his words, and his relationship to craft and narrative. so i’m not sure how it can also be true that as a reader, i feel distant to the me whose heart was shattered by this novel. 

maybe there’s some self protection/compartmentalization trying its best to work with me here, and this is in fact a testament to how deeply this book reached me. either way, it’s not often that a novel highlights the line between writer me and reader me but somehow real life has not only done that but also added depth to that division. i have been bettered by that this last year but it’s still not the sort of thing you like to be too aware of. it’s a bizarre limbo.

Maurice Weakley

I went in with high expectations and this novel somehow surpassed them. It takes place over one weekend (with a couple of flashbacks), and follows Wallace: a Black, queer student pursuing a PhD in Biochemistry. The themes present—race, sexuality, belonging, fear of the unknown, letting the past define you, etc.—are handled with a level of virtuosity that was astonishing coming from a debut author. Definitely not for everyone, but it is something that I will treasure for the foreseeable future. A new all time favorite.

Ethan Hill

Fraser Simons

Gripping prose when focused on the interiority of characters. Insightful and brilliant. The plot felt beside the point of what interested the author.

Jenna

(Thanks to @riverheadbooks for the free book) • Real Life by Brandon Taylor is so good. It lived up to the hype and went beyond for me. Before you read my thoughts I do want to highlight some other reviews that made me want to pick this book up: @parisperusing posted a brilliant own voices review back in October. @idleutopia_reads captured the reading experience perfectly in her December review. @shelfbyshelf and @allisonreadsdc posted beautiful reviews in January. @lupita.reads posted about it in February. Their reviews are in my story today!

Real Life takes place over the course of a late summer weekend, following Wallace, a gay black graduate student in the Midwest. He’s surrounded by white friends and high expectations. Wallace is a beautiful character, fully formed and complex. I felt like I knew him, I was tired for him, and my heart hurt for him.

Many reviews have written about how Taylor poignantly articulates the experiences of a gay black man in an environment that is unfortunately overwhelmingly white. Beyond that, for me, Taylor perfectly captured the pressures and loneliness and exhaustion of graduate school, the unsettled feeling of “when will my life start” or “should I be here”, the isolation, the way you are thrown in to a group of friends, the imposter syndrome, the constant pressure and wondering if it’s worth it. As someone who left a PhD program early after never quite feeling good enough, this aspect resonated so much with me.

The writing is immersive and beautiful. The late summer melancholy feeling was so strong. These characters will stick with me. I’d highly recommend this one.

Angbeen Abbas

4.5 stars. this book was beautiful, and one of the most satisfying reads i have had this year. it's so sad and raw and tender at the same time. i finished the audiobook in just a couple of days and i felt so drawn into the world that i felt disoriented when it ended.

Shameera Nair Lin

A 4.75 for me rather than a 5. This would’ve been a 5 if it were not for the final two chapters, where a sense of ‘real life’ felt a bit lost in dramatisation. Apart from that, the depth of Taylor’s observations throughout are breathtaking. Simply breathtaking writing.

jiaqi kang

priya

I originally rated this five stars, but after thinking about it more and reading some reviews I realise Real Life is quite problematic. Taylor seems to excuse sexual violence as a way of exploring mlm sex and sexuality. But, the prevalence of sexual assualt in gay male communities makes it necessary for authors to portray healthy and consensual relationships between men. On another note, Taylor's writing is beautiful and I really felt for Wallace, the main character.

TW: sexual assault as a minor and as an adult, depression, anxiety, eating disorder, racism, homophobia (these are for the quotes below too).

Quotes
 “Gifted is the sweetness meant to make the bitterness of failure palatable—that a person can fail again and again, but it’s all right, because they’re gifted, they’re worth something.”

“What Roman is referring to is instead a deficiency of whiteness, a lack of some requisite sameness. This deficiency cannot be overcome. The fact is, no matter how hard he tries or how much he learns or how many skills he masters, he will always be provisional in the eyes of these people, no matter how they might be fond of him or gentle with him.”

“Yes, he reacted out of pettiness, out of a desire to see someone brought low, but in the end, hadn’t something important been achieved? He looks to his left and sees Vincent sobbing into his hands, and Cole staring like an empty obelisk. Roman and Klaus speak to each other in angry French and German, words slashing at each other.”

“But that was the misery of trying to become something, misery that you could put up with because it was native to the act of trying. But there are other kinds of misery, the misery that comes from other people.”

“I didn’t know much about God and the devil except what you shouldn’t do to invite one or the other, but I knew that I wanted to be full of one, and if it couldn’t be the one I wanted, then I would take the other. That if God wanted nothing to do with me, then I’d take the devil. I’d take him on my knees where I’d taken the men, let him pull me down in a bed of kudzu and fuck me, so long as I wasn’t empty anymore.”

“This too is real life, he thinks. Not merely the accumulation of tasks, things to be done and sorted, but also the bumping up against other lives, everyone in the world insignificant when taken and observed together.”

“Do you want to be here or do you . . . do you just not want to be somewhere else?”

“I don’t need to talk about it to know it happened.”

“This is perhaps why people get together in the first place. The sharing of time. The sharing of the responsibility of anchoring oneself in the world. Life is less terrible when you can just rest for a moment, put everything down and wait without having to worry about being washed away. People take each other’s hands and they hold on as tight as they can, they hold on to each other and to themselves, and when they let go, they can because they know that the other person will not.”

Nadine 

overall my feeling in this book is sadness. That two broken souls found each other but then re-enacted the violence and patterns of their own youth rather than lifting each other up.
And the sadness of how we can never know what is going on in another's lives. And how people can have a pattern of acceptance of abuse and think they deserve it.

I didn't love it. I think it's a book for people who really love literature for the sake of reading literature.

The themes are great. The lab scenes dealing with the racism and the sexism, and how a white woman can still be racist and spin their interactions into her being the victim are just so good at making you hate a character and wanting to shout at them. Can't stand her, or the teacher!

The ending relationship just kept bringing tears to my eyes. Something that Taylor inserts made it such a real, heartbreaking interaction to read. 

But,to get there, we unfortunately have to wade through overly descriptive prose and just feeling like we're drifting. But I think for a debut novel, it's pretty great!

I think if you like James Baldwin I think you'll love it. Another Country comes to mind, as it's the only Baldwin I've read. It really reminds me of his way of writing the human interactions that keep circling the same group of people until someone says something that is a catalyst for something else.

Will it make the short list for the Booker? I think it might.

Laura Leila Marta

Devin Mainville

Real Life takes place over one eventful weekend for Wallace, the only black person in the very white world of science academia at an unnamed Midwestern university. I loved the prose of this book – some sentences were so beautiful I had to read them twice – and I think the author did a great job of conveying what it must feel like when the people you love most can’t comprehend your pain or experience.

The book also paints an uncomfortably accurate depiction of living with depression that I found a little hard to read at times. Ultimately, I also felt like the story left a lot unsaid and I wish there was a bit more to really sink into. I appreciate the book, but I didn’t always enjoy reading it, although that may have more to do with my headspace than the book, which is brilliantly written.

Real Life A Novel

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