The novel itself is the accumulation of vignettes from Taylor’s own life, expressed in ‘Grief Mythos’ in The Wildness, his meditation on the demise of his mother in 2014 and the death of his grandfather in 2011, but that feeling is fictionalised as that of Wallace’s father. As Emma shows her condolence after being heard the death and funeral news, Wallace reacts like on hundred normal days as if he was in ambivalence to showing any angst and pains, either in defense of being more damaged and ruined by the rampaged, and sudden hit of the losing, or facing the existential rejection of our lived life.

It gives us a very fundamental impression that Wallace and Mersault have taken grief as a ‘private belief system’ that ‘you carry around inside of you, like a secret second heart, its rhythm known only to you.’ It also draws the maps of losing out spreading in front of our eyes and scratches the portraitures of mourning with a thin silver line infinitely asking how real the feelings and emotions we habitually show.

Henrik comes forward with an open-hearted academic collaboration and cooperative friendship and alliance. Conversely, Wallace reproaches, in his defense, that ‘women are the new niggers, the new faggots’. The protagonist is going through his bruised past, filled up with sexual violence and familial loss and grief, in a fine alignment with his present carnal encounters with Miller, a bisexual grad mate, who is the first person in his family tree, like Wallace, to attend a college a gender-fluid attachment with Emma who he has befriended ‘by virtue of the fact that neither of them have white man in the program’ a racial and academic rivalry with Dana, a pragmatic and crude utilitarian research mate, who tags Wallace as a misogynist with an incalculable aversion. The novel is about a black and queer boy from Alabama named Wallace, who is doing PhD in biochemistry with Yngve, Cole, Vincent, Miller and Emma in an unnamed Midwestern grad school in the midst of white surroundings during a late summer week.

Real life by brandon taylor