Here's a secret that is probably not all that secret: when I am feeling sorry for myself, I seek out misery in other people. Not real misery: I'm not Googling genocide, or mocking Rwandans, or comparing myself to my friends and deciding that I have better hair, I am the winner. (Also? Not true, that last one.) But that's why I love Go Fug Yourself so much, and it's why I sometimes find myself actively trying to find (and read) emo-y blogs written by teenagers stuck in Omaha, or why I sometimes watch really bad episodes of True Life titled "I Vacation at the Jersey Shore."
So today, as I'm moping (a little bit) around my cube early this morning, I found myself reading the NYT review of Sebold's latest novel because I had heard it was getting pretty much panned, and though the NYT can be real jerkwads sometimes, there's probably no excusing a line like this one:
Sebold sashays blithely from ludicrous descriptions of sex (''I bit my lip. I writhed ... and hoped that no one's God was watching'') to ridiculous shifts in tone (''Her voice hit the still house with its usual force factor'') to ''we're sorry but we cannot offer you any M.F.A. funding for next year''-type sentences (''I felt the tears in my eyes and knew they would fall''). There's no plot in this novel. It's all free disassociation.
We're sorry but we cannot offer you any M.F.A. funding for next year.
Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. There's really no excusing this one. This made me wince, and normally I'm the type of person who's pleased to learn that the kid who once called me "the ugliest girl in fifth grade," is now addicted to meth and has no legs. But this is just mean.
And yet--I feel better.
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