Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Selected Commentary on Marie Calloway's what purpose did i serve in your life


Just finished Marie Calloway's what purpose did i serve in your life. Her book, like the stories of which it's comprised, has generated a lot of controversy. Sometimes the conversation about the book is more interesting than the book itself. I've collected snippets of talk from various blogs, lit magazines, Amazon reviews, and discussion boards. 

Here are a few favorites:  

"The most touching chapter involves a gentle British man easing Marie into prostitution."

"Marie has written the book we all want to read in this era of internet stalking and reality TV."

"Marie Calloway is being given Publishing Deals for Hardly doing Shit" 

"Much in the same way that the girl on her knees getting facefucked is running the entire show, Marie applies the rules of BDSM to the author-reader relationship"

"perfectly suited for the contemporary attention span."

"Calloway’s novel contains a number of image macros ripped from her publicly shared gdoc diaries. These contain facebook chats, criticisms pasted over nudes of herself, and cyber-sex re-pastes. When reading, one may feel like part of a wound gaping about Calloway’s body."

"The nastiest most fucked up sex of your life will not occur with random strangers, no matter how hard you try. It will occur with people that you love and trust, who expose the darkest weird shit of their souls."

"Unadorned depictions of rough (+ occasionally vanilla) scenes of intercourse proved the least interesting"

"Would like to read about her experience as a biography that is continuous and not as broken up."

"No one cares about her ‘talent,’ …What people care about is youth. And I sincerely hope that Marie Calloway is strong enough to withstand the next five years of people telling her that she’s ‘talented’ when what they mean is ‘young.’"


"The Poor Girl has so Much Self-Loathing! And the Naïveté! Is this where an American Sx Education gets you?"

"People saw what they wanted to see in the blankness, which, to mix metaphors, was primarily a reflection of themselves. So no one was really interested in writing about Marie Calloway." 

"There is no real arc or moment of growth or revelation at the end." 

"The Book is a Blip, my Friends, a Can of Beer, a 25 Minute Porn set in a Blank Apartment featuring Blank Actors Zero Passion Obscured Genitals and downLoadable for Free off the Web"

"the Pics are Shitty Quality and Black and White" 

"Personally, I don’t find any of these qualities to be particularly problematic"

-
I'll let this stand on its own, rather than offering my own review/opinion piece. The last thing we need is another one of those.

No comments:

Post a Comment