Real Life

Real Life is a campus coming-of-age story that follows Wallace, a black, queer biochemistry PhD student originally from the South, and a brief cross-section of his life as a grad student at a nondescript Midwestern university. His life is one of real and imposed isolation in what feels like purgatory between the trauma of his childhood and the unknowable expanses of the life that follows grad school.

The way the author portrays the micro aggressions Wallace faces over such a short period of time is as heartbreaking as it is frustrating, infuriating even. As someone who rarely, if ever, experiences that, it's a painful window into an accumulation of hurts. The perfunctory nature of Wallace's day, a head-down feeling, is stippled with big metaphysical dreads, and a beautifully-written but absolutely horrific unveiling of survived trauma.

I thought the book was wonderfully written and an exercise in empathy for what it's like to have a marginalized identity in academia.

This novel is bleak. I did not enjoy reading this book and I hated every single character. And I wouldn't really recommend it, given how heavy and ugly the story is. But it also resonated and felt deeply true in that way that way that only fiction can. I'm having a hard time sorting out my feelings about my life from my feelings about the book and the one to five star rating system just doesn't really translate for me here.