relevancy is the sauce of youth

me: yeah, i wrote a book.

99% of people i tell: really what’s it about?

me: uh, like, it’s about this guy and girl and they have like, a complicated relationship, uh, it’s sort of about like- their interactions with the world, i don’t know, it’s hard to explain. it’s like, it’s about love but maybe more about perversion and lust as being greater than love…fuck, just..ignore me. 

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novel was written over a period of 8 months and then spent 4-6 months on ‘deep-editing’, written mostly in coffee shops around eastern canada (quebec, new brunswick, nova scotia) a particularly key section was written near the laurentians after a period of intense depression, introspection and rye. 

novel balances 3 narratives in 3 tenses: an obsessive bulimic on the verge of a drug relapse, a recent college grad with seminal perversions, a ‘sexless, blind, nameless cripple’ with a convenient lack of memory. 

bulimic is first person present, college grad is 3rd person omniscient, sexless thing is 1st person past

lili/frank/rapunzel

book comes in at around 45,000 words

key terms- drugs, sex, joylessness, vomit, bulimia, washing machine, adderall, dahl, lazuli, pills, action figures, piles, imaginary people, condensation, playgrounds, beer, cavity, anhedonia, cheating, cocker spaniel, the coast, cat food, vegetarian food, dust, itadakimitsu, melted barbies, carpet, 1-2-3, almost

book explores the relationship between frank and lili, their subjective thoughts/actions, the way they are in a relationship that nourishes both their sanity and universal isolation. about how i felt when i finished university and it is about the importance of keeping secrets from yourself in order to cope or comply with the world. 

while writing- read a lot of blake butler, osho, tao te ching, dennis cooper, robertson davies. listened to julian lynch nearly every day, watched mad men, synecdoche new york, kenny vs. spenny, ate and drank, visited html giant, DC blog, pop serial, faceook, mariel clayton. stared obsessively at mariel clayton art, exercised obsessively, camped, swam, biked, hiked, drove, yoga’d, consumed boxes and boxes of honey nut cheerios, smoked, cried and self-loathed. 

this is the book.