Pageboy: A Memoir

dnf at 34%. i just can’t do it. i’m sorry elliot but i can’t fathom how i’m supposed to finish this book. between the drawn out memories of childhood bullying and whiplash, blunt, matter of fact mentions of sexual abuse, it’s hard to really feel what elliot is trying to convey beyond a nonlinear timeline of bullet point events. the vignettes are jumbled in such incomprehensible order that it’s not always clear what age elliot is or where in his coming out story we are. nor do any of these scenes flow together in a stream of consciousness fashion, instead reading like post it notes lacking connective tissue or introspection on how they relate to each other or how they have affected elliot. the book continues to tell me what happened but never how it made him feel, how it has changed him as a person, or what he’s done to move on or recover from any of it. beyond that are randomly dropped in, seemingly pointless chunks of canadian history that do not tie into the memory we are being told about in the first place. the history notes, while interesting, serve no purpose other than to allow elliot to be emotionally detached from the writing process for a few paragraphs and subsequently hinder the reader’s ability to follow elliot’s journey in any purposeful way.