I’ll admit that I don’t usually read self-published books, which perhaps makes me some kind of snob. I also don’t tend to read memoirs, or to write anything approaching book reviews. Yet, while I haven’t read a huge number of books this year, two of them do in fact happen to be self-published memoirs, and here I am spewing out some thoughts about the first one. Bonus: I read the book, and actually wrote most of the below, in January, so do I even have clear memories of any of it at this point, probably not.
The book in question is called Lesbian crush diaries: School, bulimia, France. There are probably countless books out there about experiencing confusing same-sex attraction as a teenager, but I was drawn to this one (actually a trilogy, but released as a single ebook) because of, er, certain parallels with my own life, the one I’ll be most forthcoming about being the narrator-protagonist Natasha’s obsession with one of her secondary school teachers. (Given the title, I should probably point out that I do not have experience with eating disorders.)
From the age of twelve to seventeen, I had this … thing for one of my teachers that completely consumed me, to the point of basically dictating my main extracurricular interests, which university I attended, significant elements of my worldview at the time … wild. Adolescence is just such a bizarre phase of life and I fervently hope never to have to interact with anyone aged under eighteen ever again. But when the internet rabbit hole revealed to me that not only had someone had similar experiences twenty years earlier, but had actually published a book about it, I obviously had to seek it out. There are moments in the first part of LCD that are excruciatingly relatable: the parts where Natasha makes reference to, like, the weird dichotomy of wanting to see the person and to avoid them at the same time, taking particular routes through the school because she knew exactly when her teacher would be passing through, paying so much attention to what she wore, second-guessing everything she said … awful. Knowing all this useless stuff about her. God, yes. Did I honestly waste five years of my life doing this?
As the book went on and moved into Natasha’s university years, her experiences became a lot less similar to my own: not that that’s a bad thing, but I guess it was maybe a shock that someone I’d had this secret taboo thing in common with then turned out to be very unlike me, I suppose. In the early stages I was thinking, cripes, she’s even weirder than I was: the things she was doing in her first year at university reached a level of obsessiveness that was utterly beyond me. But at the same time she seems to have been developing into something resembling a normal twenty-year-old: doing a terrible job at work, going out to bars, getting chatted up by lads, which was very much not what I was up to at that time. The most outrageous thing I did that year was attend a sum total of one house party (the second of my entire life) and get very drunk (for about the third time in my entire life).
The writing style was a bit frustrating at times. It’s obviously impossible to know how much these diary entries have been edited – they’re clearly selected highlights regardless, as the first few years pass by very quickly. The diaries start when Natasha is thirteen or fourteen, and either she was an extremely good writer for that age, or the material has been heavily spruced up. But the style doesn’t ever really evolve much beyond that. Natasha often appears to have a very detached, emotionless reaction in the way she relates events, which restricts the narrative’s ability to be engaging, and I’m saying this as someone whose favourite activity is avoiding emotions at all costs.
Several of the lesbian-leaning characters in the book reveal that they’ve experienced the same crush on a teacher phenomenon. This is such a perennial feature of being a non-heterosexual teenager and I’m honestly bewildered by the fact that it isn’t more of a known thing in media. It seems as if the only people who know about it are those of us who had the misfortune to experience it: I suppose we all tried to keep it secret, although I didn’t have much success with that at the time, and Natasha clearly doesn’t here either. Something I found interesting was the way these characters all define their sexualities differently: one is confident that she is a lesbian, another decides she’s straight, Natasha herself goes through a phase of describing herself as “heterosexual and homoemotional”, although the author of the book seems to identify unequivocally as a lesbian today. Natasha kisses many more men in the book than I have in my life, even though I legit thought I was straight until I was about 22 (which clearly makes no sense given the above … that’s some tasty denial), but that’s probably more a function of my personality than my sexuality.
In conclusion: the first volume was worth reading given my own experiences, but I didn’t find the rest particularly engaging. Having said that, the writing was a lot better than in the other self-published memoir I’ve read recently, which will perhaps be the subject of another non-review.