BOOKS | It’s not that I hated this book.

It wasn’t badly written. It was compelling enough. (I actually raced through it less than a week, despite the demands of a life that amounts to three full-time jobs).

It’s just that I fucking hated this book.

This Is Where We Live is the story of an ostensibly nice middle-class artsy, gen x, cis het couple (him: music, her: movies) who go belly up on an LA-adjacent house during the 2008 crisis.

Boo. Fucking. Hoo.

But that’s not really the problem here. The problem with This Is Where We Live is that there’s no hero, no one to root for. The text is populated entirely and unrelentingly by … assholes. Utter, irredeemable assholes. The protagonists are assholes. The supporting characters are assholes. Even the bit players are assholes. They’re all either throwaway assholes or basic liberal dumpster fires who don’t realize they’re morally-bankrupt assholes. And who certainly don’t realize that as a consequence, they deserve what they get.

ONLY what they get is … nothing. Within five months of the mere threat that this couple of ding dongs might default on their ARM mortgage and lose their house, they’re both just … fine? Actually, they’re thriving, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank, PLUS they still own property, only this time, NOT from the damn bank, they own outright. Oh, and I mentioned the hundreds of thousands they ended up with in savings on top of owning outright, right? I think I mentioned that?

Sorry, it’s just baffling.

When I read a book like this I find it impossible to figure out if the characters are meant to be assholes, and if the author is even aware of it. Like, was Janelle Brown deliberately writing two assholes here, or is she herself an asshole who thinks these people and their behaviour are behaving appropriately? I truly cannot tell.

I can’t tell if this was supposed to be some sort of social commentary that I wasn’t fully twigging to. Did Brown write this book thinking, ‘Oh, people are just like this. This is reality. This is relatable.’? Because I cannot relate. At. all. And while I certainly do know people like this – people who blithely make their selfish little decisions, who imagine themselves insulated and better-than, who roll through life refusing to acknowledge that their choices have reverberating consequences, I hate those people. I used to be friends with several of them before I came to my damn senses and grew the fuck up. Now, such people are a rarity in my life, and good riddance.

So really, what is going on here?

Who was I supposed to hitch my little wagon to? The wife character was somewhat more sympathetic than the husband. While she is also awful, making many the cringe-worthy moral choice and enjoying no just-desserts to speak of, she at least seems to realize her own failings to an extent and does attempt, in very small ways, to correct them. Nonetheless, it’s all very unsatisfying. She doesn’t really learn anything and I don’t know about you, but when I encounter people as gross as these folks are, I really need a book to give me a little more in the way of comeuppance. I mean, it’s fiction. It is thoroughly unpleasant to have to swallow 300+ pages of atrocity rewarded. Donald. Fucking. Trump. holds the dang ‘highest office in the land’. I get enough of this garbage in real life.

Anyway, this wasn’t a new book. It came out in 2010. Maybe I’d have felt differently about it had I read it then, but I didn’t, and here we are.

And not for nothing, but this book, in addition to the crimes noted above, is also deeply and repeatedly fatphobic.

I lost count of the boring and clichéd references to widening thighs and bottoms, as well as the number of small-time characters with fat bodies meant to signal bad unpleasant or unlikeable personalities. Meanwhile, the filmmaker character goes on and on about a hack script that she’s given, filled with shitty clichés and wooden dialogue. Meanwhile, I have to read about widening asses as a signifier of bad personality all the livelong day? Give me a fucking break, Janelle.

I’ll be popping this overpriced hardback into the modern day literary dumpster (a Little Free Library) very soon indeed. May it live forever in purgatory, next to unwanted religious vanity pubs and Windows 10 user guides.

This Is Where We Live was released on June 15, 2010.