BOOKS READ 38: RICHARD YATES BY TAO LIN
The book reminds me heavily of a person. A boy. A friend. A really good friend. Up until kind of recently, my best friend. Someone I met at a really young age and who I developed a large basis of who I am, how I see life and bleh/groan - how I defined love (or, what I thought was love, fyi, I think love and defining and anything that pertains to it is a constant process - learned that…quite recently!). He was that person that I thought was it, that in the end, I wanted to be with for a very long time (ha, what do I know). None of that ever happened and it confused me to no end. It was a constant thing in our friendship where we would have a good time together and the conversation of a romantic relationship would come up and it would end with me being heartbroken, picking up the pieces, and then going through the slow cycle again of becoming good friends, having moments, developing more feelings, and not having them returned. This dragged on for like 7 years. Yuck. And it just ended abruptly, and maybe it could have just faded away or I could have so obviously seen that there was a reason for everything and to have let that fact changed how I viewed our friendship.
I don’t really know where he is or what he’s doing, but I hope he’s well and doing what he wants to do and is happier then when I last saw him.
The writing in this book is stark, the characters talked liked him, thought like him - completely non-sensical/slightly surreal, slightly violent, very distant, and the book had a weird humor (the characters’ names are Haley Joel Osmont and Dakota Fanning - it made the first few pages funny to read, then the novelty kind of wore off). It’s about a couple found in this moment in time. Both the characters were really annoying in their own ways, the guy seemed really selfish - demanding and expecting really unimportant things from his girlfriend (Dakota Fanning) and throwing a really stupid fit if she didn’t meet his expectations. Grow up Haley Joel Osmont. And Dakota Fanning. Yeesh, letting Haley Joel Osmont walk all over her all the time. Come on. Haley Joel Osmont? You can do better Dakota. Totally.
And you, you can always do better. If that’s what I learned from this book and from that friendship, it’s that. Not just better in terms of finding a better guy or significant other, but also a better way to put things, to see things, to know things.
Totally.
