The opening line "I liked hurting girls." grabbed me and the following pages made my heart pound as I realized that what was done to me in my lifetime was all documented in this diary. What was done to us, what motivates others to harm us, and what we allow them to do. This is an honest, real, account of the legacy of pain, neglect and abuse. I'm worried about the impressionable young adults who will pick up this book and think that this is a story of love and redemption. Comparing this book to Catcher in the Rye and Lolita is insulting to both of those books. The whole "story" is 95% him complaining about how horrible his life is while the other 5% is how horrible he was treated by the girl he loves (and by love I mean obsesses over, thinks about hurting her, and then condemns her for doing the same thing to him that he's done to countless women before with very little remorse). The narrator is a pretentious asshole with zero redeeming qualities.
Comparing this book to Catcher in the Rye and Lo Without a doubt one of the worst books I have ever read. But this book is defiantly marmite you’ll either like it or you really won’t.Without a doubt one of the worst books I have ever read. If you are able to push this aside and delve a little bit deeper then you are reading about a person with some serious issues in his life that he is at least making some attempt at trying to change. In conclusion this is not a book for those that are easily offended by things, especially in relation to the treatment of women. It is just a clever thought provoking little book the more you try to look at it and delve into the minds of the characters. Because if you think about it, you have read around 150 pages of someone writing all whilst breathing, the person who has wrote this has effectively stolen that oxygen from you, when you could have used it doing something you really enjoyed. The more I think on the title the more it also seems to suit the book, especially if you hate it. It more feels like a slow burn karma coming to bite you on the bum type situation. In some ways you think ok he has gotten better with things in regards to how he treats people, but you don’t necessarily ever feel sorry for him or feel like he ever truly redeems himself in any way.
The characters are not likeable, you feel sorry for the people that have been hurt for no other reason than to off shoot the pain that our main character is internally feeling due to his alcoholism, and by the end you don’t really know how to feel.
I personally went into it reading it a piece of fiction, but the more I sit and reflect on it the more I can see why a memoir would also fit, as it reads more as a stream of consciousness, and I know that there are people out in the world who act the way these characters do. I understand what the author was trying to convey writing this piece, whether people wish to see it as fiction or more of a memoir is up to them as it could change the way that you view the work.
It takes a lot to offend me in a piece of writing and to DNF texts, and to do that I really need to feel like I’m not going to get/learn anything from what I’m reading. I knew it shouldn’t of been a book for me really from the first line, but at the same time it was so enticing as I wanted to see if I would really hate it, and in all honesty it was ok. I can very much see why this book is very polarising for people to read, on one hand the subject matter and the way that our main character talks and acts towards women is frankly quite disturbing to begin with. T.W in book – alcoholism, drug use, mental abuse, misogyny.