Luster

tw death, suicide

okay. brief complaint: run on sentences that were SO LONG, I got lost so many times and found myself rereading over and over. it did not help that many of these run ons were obnoxiously long lists of allusions or references to things I have never heard of and that would be tedious to look up. and sometimes i was just lost generally in the words themselves. for example, “songs you don't so much listen to as project your memory onto the wax,” was one that stuck with me for so long i had to keep it in my notes app for future reference. so as much as i loved this, there were long stretches of it (specifically in the beginning to middle) where i was not understanding much and was just reading over shit.

but genuinely, i digress and that complaint means very little because, by the end, i was like...basically in tears. as it progressed, it was less about a weird set up in this household. it became an insanely emotion illustration of an obscure (and pretty conditional) relationship between women. the MC makes some cruel decisions but i would argue that she does not get a fucking break and this cruelty only stems from that.

the most impressive (and potentially triggering) aspect of this was the way suicidal thoughts were just kind of planted everywhere and they felt authentic and perfectly placed. dare i say, i resonated with some it (but like im okay??). for example, there's this moment where she's talking to the husband and she's talking pretty abstractly about how surviving as a HIM vs. as herself is very different. she defines their relationship and survival as, “a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep on getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and tells you it would be easier to be dead”. And idk, i cried at that. Leilani just has a way of describing wanting to die! what can i say! anyways, if u get nothing else from this dense ass paragraph, it should be that death is spoken about very bluntly and if that's triggering for you, i would probably steer clear of this one.

if you love stream of consciousness, bluntness (towards sex, death, race, etc), brief dialogue, and open endings, you might like this. the language feels informal/coversational at the start then gets profound as fuck at the end. idk!!!!!! just read it. i literally read it in one day.