2.5
True Love
ByPublisher Description
“Gerard’s prose is unlabored, flatly observational, and the interwoven mini stories are at once tender and cold, exhilarating and regrettable—each undermining the one that precedes it.”
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesTrue Love Reviews
2.5
“I wanted to love this book so badly. I knew going in from reading the description that there wasn’t going to be any likable characters as that was the point and that wasn’t what bothered me. The lack of growth in the characters didn’t bother me either. The thing that bothered me was that it said Nina was looking for true love and I never once got the sense the Nina was trying to do anything but self destruct. Even if she was all the things she was, and being as horrible as she was, but was actually consciously seeking out love I would have enjoyed it more. As someone who loves first person narration it didn’t seem like it fit very well with this cold, detached, and observational story telling. The story felt very disconnected from what was said in the back.”
“I really hated this. Weird, random, freaky as hell. No lesson or moral to be learned at all. Every character was an asshole.”
“i was today years old when it was unveiled unto me, a whole actual genre dedicated to the very fiction i have come to believe was only mine to have discovered and adore. it goes by the name, mumblecore.
what i'd assumed was serendipitous all this while, whenever i stumbled across a powerfully written novel that somehow emerged powerful despite being largely led without plot; powerful even as it intentionally replaced crisp storylines with emotionally sharp, incisive commentaries that had no clear beginning, middle, or ending; was in fact not serendipitous by nature - nor did it exist completely out of fortuity - but rather, was a rarity, borne from the act of subscribing religiously to a raw, honest form of art: and that art goes by the name, mumblecore.
mumblecore adheres to a strict formula of prioritising dialogue over plot; of uncovering profound meaning in seemingly mundane nothingness. of not conspicuously pushing forth a good character, and a bad character, and a whole bunch of cliche side archetypes - just humans, with their own messy, unpredictable palette of complexities that somehow weave and intertwine to form one single messed up tapestry known as the human existence. there is no real story in mumblecore - or rather, the story is in the nothingness; and here, the reader's euphoria does not lie solely in the hands of a gratifying ending but instead, in the artistry of prose as it unravels the complicated inner workings of the human condition.
which is why i was, admittedly, a little shocked to come here and find out how badly this book has resonated with many who failed to understand the real purpose behind this fiction. mumblecore, is an art. it is not made simply to be seen, or read. it is made to be felt, and felt deeply to the bone. mumblecore is often gritty, and acidic, and tragically destructive, like a good Taylor Swift song; and when done well, it leaves you feeling highly uncomfortable with yourself as if something just came too close to the deepest corners of your mind without your permission.
if you ask me what makes good mumblecore fiction, i would tell you that Storyline has the least to do with any of it. in fact, when executed well, you will not even be able to tell beginning from end. you realise the story could literally have ended at any point along the way and still make for an ending, just as it could have begun at any point of the story and still make for a beginning. (and is that not life?)
in well-executed mumblecore, you couldn't care less what happens one way or another; because your emotional investment is weaved into the intricacies of its subtle nuances and undertones, of how everything and yet nothing is always happening at the same time. it lies in the fact that you can hate all of the characters in the book all at once, and yet, somehow, be inexplicably tethered to the raw, pulsating heartbeat of their flawed humanity.
and the more visceral all of this is, the more, strangely, gratifying, the story becomes.
and that, is everything True Love is.
having somehow obsessed over mumblecore long before i even knew mumblecore to be a thing, i'd long recognised it to be perhaps one of the most Herculean efforts at storytelling that anyone could possible undertake... and Sarah Gerard has a truly remarkable gift for it. her words are captivating and elegant and almost... balletic- and she has a ridiculously alluring sense of time, place and identity for everything. in true mumblecore fashion, you really don't care how and where the story goes so long as it isn't the easy way out (because how is that life?), and the emotional payoff is meant to be hard-won, often times entangled with unease.
i don't care what has been said, and i dont care if this is an unpopular opinion - but as far as True Love goes, it is one of the most lyrical writing i have read in a long time; and i loved it, and i loved it unapologetically.”
About Sarah Gerard
Sarah Gerard is the author of the essay collection Sunshine State, which was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and the novel Binary Star, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, T Magazine, Granta, The Baffler, Vice, and the anthologies Tampa Noir, We Can’t Help it if We’re From Florida, and One Small Blow Against Encroaching Totalitarianism. She lives in New York City with her true love, the writer Patty Yumi Cottrell. Find her at Sarah-Gerard.com.
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