Yeah, okay, I won't torture myself. It's not a pleasant read. I took this one because I love Eric's acting and I think monologues are clever + he was amazing with them on stage. But this one is a dissapointment. I find the way he writes about women extremely disturbing. Maybe that was the goal and it's all a character work, but I don't think the plot is worth overcoming the revulsion (I've skimmed through the last diary entries).

First of all, I had no idea what this book was about. I decided to pick it up since I'd never read any of the author's books before. I read it in two sittings only because I decided to start it one night before bed and stayed up until 4 am with it. When I picked it up a second time I couldn't put it down until I finished it.

This book was so emotional in all the worst ways that it really makes you reevaluate your own standing in life and what you want out of it. We get this very limited view of this man's life through two very different stages of it where he through it all, whether he knows it or not, is deeply miserable. 

The few glimpses where the main character shows any signs of emotion feel almost shameful to read, as if being a human like everyone else is his cross to bear. 
It's incredibly interesting because there's so many people around him at all times and he's never making a connection with any of them unless it benefits him some way or the other in order to move his writer career further along. We've all met many people like him, or have behaved like him one way or the other which makes this book even more infuriating. 
I was so annoyed by him in the way that the entire time I kept hoping this person has a moment of self-realization and he's always so close to it but his massive self-absorption gets to him first and keeps him trapped there, never letting him go. 
It's a very introspective book about someone who constantly rejects any long lasting introspection.

I could (unfortunately) see a lot of myself in Richard which is a disturbing thought to have, but only to the extent of his pessimist views of the world. If I were to also be a white man maybe I'd have his self-righteousness as well and my unhappiness would stem from a different, more privileged place but I'm not. 

It's a book written in a different time about even more different times, I don't think I would've enjoyed it as much had it been released recently so I'm glad I found it now and at this stage of my life. 
I will think about this book a lot, I feel as if it has rewired something deep in me, time will tell whether I choose to see it or whether Richard and I are more alike than I initially thought.

I've been thinking about this one since I finished it and will probably continue to think about it for a long time.

When you start this book, you think that Richard's dissatisfaction with his own life + the death of his beloved aunt + the rediscovery of his young adult journals will propel him to make some sort of major change in his life, repairing his personal relationships with his ex-wife and father and reigniting his true creative spirit. But the longer the novel goes on and the more you learn about young Richard, the more you start to realize that Richard has never had a creative spirit and is eternally trapped in a cycle of treating people like garbage and refusing to learn from it. He will never learn and he will never change. He continues to steal material from other people's lives for his "art" and will be rewarded for it. He continues to treat women like shit and refuse to accept it.

As he tracks down friends and acquaintances from his misspent youth, they coldly deny him the forgiveness and growth he desires. No one likes him and no one misses him. No one is going to tell him they want to still be friends and that he made their young adulthood better. The one person who does want to reconnect with him is suffering from a mix of psychosis and dementia, further cutting Richard off from any sense of catharsis. He finally slept with that untouchable girl he wanted to when he was twenty, and guess what? It sucked. Off Richard goes to the next distraction. It is horrible yet fascinating to watch. 

But it is funny that Richard is anti-Israel. Heartbreaking: the worst person you know just made a great point

I’m so sorry Eric your misspent youth is really interesting but I set this down when I was three-quarters of the way through maybe a month ago and I just couldn’t bring myself to pick it back up…

Absolute gut punch. Starts out tricking you into thinking it's one thing -- a relatively sympathetic portrait of a lonely writer looking back on his naive but optimistic past through diaries from the 1970s that he rediscovers -- but gradually, sneakily becomes something else. This is a corruption narrative. It's darkly funny in places, deeply sad, and with some unnervingly resonant passages about memory and artistic integrity and who and what we value on the path up, and the path down. I had to read it slowly because it kept cutting my legs out from under me in different ways.

For anyone else who, like me, is partially here for trashy IWTV reasons: eerily, Bogosian's protagonist here shares a lot in common with Daniel Molloy, drugs, bicuriosity, tape recorder and all. But like, if he were evil and sucked -- and not in a fun vampire way.

It feels weird and fated that Bogosian wrote this back in 2009. But it also stands alone as an absolute wallop of a novel.