– I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review. –
To be published by Random House on 31 Jan 2017
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At a private East Coast college, two young women meet in art class. Sharon Kisses, quietly ambitious but self-doubting, arrives from rural Kentucky. Mel Vaught, brash, unapologetic, wildly gifted, brings her own brand of hellfire from the backwaters of Florida. Both outsiders, Sharon and Mel become fervent friends, bonding over underground comics and dysfunctional families. Working, absorbing, drinking. Drawing: Mel, to understand her own tumultuous past, and Sharon, to lose herself altogether.
A decade later, Sharon and Mel are an award-winning animation duo, and with the release of their first full-length feature, a fearless look at Mel’s childhood, they stand at the cusp of success. But while on tour to promote the film, cracks in their relationship start to form: Sharon begins to feel like a tag-along and suspects that raucous Mel is the real artist. When unexpected tragedy strikes, long-buried resentments rise to the surface, threatening their partnership—and hastening a reckoning no one sees coming.
I chose this book because…
There are many things about this book (or at least its blurb) that reminds me of The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer, and because I enjoyed that book, this one intrigues me. Both deal with characters that are different but united in their love for art, and in The Animators, their love for animation specifically. I like reading about art and artists, fictional or real, because I like to see where art takes them, and I like to see art as something more than just visual beauty and fluffiness. Because art is so much more than that. Also, I can relate to feeling like a tag-along, feeling inferior, and just doubting myself in general. I can’t think of a specific example right now personally because I’m feeling pretty good atm haha, but there have definitely been darker moments.
Upon reading it…
I don’t know if it was because I read this book in one sitting on my flight from Beijing to Philly, but it seemed like the conflict between Sharon and Mel all occurred during the beginning of the book, which left the bulk of the book to be about how they collaborated for their next animation, discovering and sharing and exposing each other’s truths to each other, and creating art to share with the world. In this way it differed from The Interestings. It wasn’t what I expected from reading the blurb, but I enjoyed this story nonetheless and in its own way.
**highlight to reveal potential spoilers**
Ryan and Tatum were my favourites. I was charmed by their boyish enthusiasm. Mel sort of reminded me of Alaska from Looking for Alaska by John Green—beautiful and flawed. Sharon was the one I related to the most (except for the troubling past)—creative but also practical, a quieter personality but something special underneath if you took the time to look, insecure about worth but soon to be realised. (The only thing is that it seemed pretty obvious to me to tell Teddy about the animation beforehand, which she didn’t.) As a creative, I can appreciate how much of ourselves we put in our art (though I admit that I’m not as high stakes as Mel or Sharon haha). The tragedy, the recovery, the self-discovery took me all the way.
★★★★☆
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The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer
I had chosen art because I needed something to make use of the bright lights that had existed in my head for as long as I could remember, my fervent, neon wish to be someone else.
My drug of choice at eighteen: the quiet devouring of boys in my head.
I wanted so badly to be more than what I felt. I wanted to be good. I wanted to be great, even. But I was cowed by the knowledge that everyone else here did, too.
Before I saw her, even, I saw what she did.
It’s the greatest thing you can do for something. Giving it movement. Possibility.
It was while watching the show that the idea of being any kind of artist first occurred to me. Being wrapped in that story was the furthest I had ever been away from myself. That something could lift me out of my skin like that was a revelation.
She was the first person to see me as I had always wanted to be seen. It was enough to indebt me to her forever.
Not every guy is worth an atomic explosion.
My love life, as it is, largely a spectator sport.
I desire blindly, with wild, flinging abandon, but no aims, no goals.
Life’s not easy. We do the best we can.
You live a stupid life, you will more likely than not have a stupid death.
An effect I suppose I should have known in theory. But you can know almost anything in theory.
She’s one of those people who robs the room of all its oxygen.
Childhood is pretty much ground zero for stories, right?
Art is what it is. And to use a work as a scapegoat for the crazy things people do is real, real shortsighted.
But hindsight’s twenty-twenty, isn’t it.
We have to start from wherever we are.
What good is it to do this for a living if you can’t share it with people? If it doesn’t bring people together?
It hits me how badly I want to get back to work, how much I’ve been missing it. The anticipation before a new project. Envisioning it in the confines of your own head, intangible, a whiff of itself, two steps from a daydream. Then, through work and love and sheer fucking will, it becomes real.
Memories have a life of their own. They evolve like we do. They wake up, go back to sleep. But that’s why they make for such incredible ideas.
Don’t you think this is the time to be brave, and make something scary and new and incredible?
You’ll be surprised how little things turn into big things.
Funny thing. The prettier the face, the fewer the details. Fewer lines, less sketch time. Not as complex as an old lady. Or a dude. Any dude.
You know, it would be nice if we were defined, ultimately, by the people and places we loved. Good things. But at the end of the day, there’s the reality that we’re not. Does the good stuff really have the weight that the weird stuff does? What makes the deeper imprint—all the ridges and gathers—on who we are? Do we have a choice?
It was a love that did not occur to us physically. It had a body in the way children handle each other when they do not yet know intimacy—closeness without electrical current.
It was in the way he picked through the world, watching everything like it might come down on top of him.
Self-removal. Inside, she has fled.
They will never forget how to make themselves disappear. To blend into the air.
There’s a lot that can bring two people together, it occurs to me. They may, unawares, have entire conversations that do not take place in words. They may never know, themselves, what is admitted, what is declared. What binds.
How well do I know my own mind, the wormy crannies of my memory? My particular blank space, so white and unknowable that it hurts to look directly into it?
When you need something so huge that you lack a clear objective, you will make do with whatever is there.
A project always begins like a pimple on the back of the neck. You can’t see it, but you can feel it, rising just under the surface. And it drives you crazy. It swells, gains definition, becomes visible. The bigger it gets, the more it presses into the back of your spine. The more it presses, the less you can focus on anything else. Working on it every day is just a way of scratching the itch until you’ve finished its business and it slowly starts to shrink back down.
I want to be able to feel this way all the time. To be able to laugh about the things that have happened to me, baggage and all, light and dark. To own it handily enough so that it could be funny and horrifying at once.
This is the kind of beauty that gives you the fever wish to make things.
You make your head a hospitable enough place to be, why would you ever want to leave?
It’s the kind of conversation that makes you feel an unspeakable closeness to another human being. For me, a person who has always considered herself alone, those conversations feel like a gift, someone trusting me with something private and valuable.
My body is lit from the inside out with Teddy, our talk. Maybe we’re not wired to have many of these moments, as people. If we had too many of them in a single life, we would forget the heat of intimacy. We’d have nothing left to crave.
You make your head a hospitable place to be, you might never want to leave it. But if you’re trapped in there, you’re doomed. I decided a long time ago that surviving probably meant achieving something in the middle.
“He’s not used to this kind of thing.”
“Who is used to this kind of thing?”
She shrugs. “Artists and sociopaths? I dunno.”
She loved hard. If she loved you, she loved you the most.
Both knew that if you were a child, and you watched TV in a room by yourself as we did, saw this video, heard this song, it struck something primal and private in you, the sense of being at your most alone in the anticipation of adult pain, a gray future memory. It was reassuring to be with someone else while you listened, so you were no longer the only one in the room, could be reassured that your adult life was not entirely the thing you had feared.
Your life is the people who fill it. And nothing’s good without them.
His face is so earnest, so hopeful. This is a person who hasn’t lost much yet.
I never noticed how big the silence was when Mel wasn’t screaming into it.
And now, when the universe says no, I’m more inclined to tire, sit back, and with a feeling of mild constipation say, Okay. It is the ache of a phantom limb. I try to pretend that I’m not sleepwalking.
Her laugh. It was great. It was awful. It was a sound like Satan rubbing his thighs together. She was deeply embarrassing to see movies with.
Finding yourself in a world someone else has made is a theft that is difficult to put into words—the magnitude of your life, smeared to their order, your voice impersonated or, worse, winked out altogether.
Every time I saw you, you were surrounded by, I dunno. Light. And people. And noise. I just thought, there’s no way. There’s no way I could ever slip into that woman’s orbit.