LIVEBLOG

July 30, 2018
In the early morning of Mar. 17, 2013, Boyle resolved: “I will be liveblogging everything i do, think, feel, and say, to the best of my ability.” Originally posted to her personal Tumblr, the project is collected as a 700-page tome. Boyle makes clear from the first page that “**THIS IS NOT GOING TO BE INTERESTING**,” and, more often than not, she keeps that promise—unless a reader thinks it’s riveting that on Apr. 8, 2013, at 8:31 p.m., Boyle “ate baba ganoush and three rice cakes.” Nevertheless, the book is frequently funny, clever, and even heartwarming. Over the six months chronicled, Boyle complicates things with her ex-boyfriend Zachary, moves to New York with her cats Alvie and Shirley, contemplates a “realistic course of action” to becoming an astronaut, has a Kafkaesque DMV experience (the only kind), and does enough Xanax, Adderall, morphine, crack cocaine, Vyvanse, noopept, heroin, nicotine, and Monster energy drink to give Hunter S. Thompson a run for his money. Indeed, calculating how many days Boyle has been awake, or wincing when she ingests more amphetamines at 3:03 a.m. and operates a motor vehicle, offers some of the book’s most page-turning thrills. Boyle’s story, of a 20-something trying to get her life together, is universal and relatable. Though not a narrative in any conventional sense, this is a riveting concept and a challenging volume.

September 1, 2018
Mix David Foster Wallace with Patti Smith, Augusten Burroughs, and Karen Finley, throw in powders and pills, stuff it in a deep-dish pizza box, and you're in the territory of compulsive blogger Boyle's post-postmodern blockbuster."Feel like I'm about to vomit and I'm being watched and my execution is soon." So writes sometime Vice columnist Boyle toward the end of this long, loping hyperextension of the "quantified self" or life-logging movement, by which every thought, every detail, every meal, every bed-wetting, every kiss, every bowel movement, every drink, every drug over the year 2013 gets recorded, "everything i do, think, feel, and say, to the best of my ability." Oh, are there drugs and drinks, and oh are there all those other things, most of them definitively in the realm of the First-World problem. Xanax, Adderall, heroin, energy drinks, phenethylamine, doughnuts, pizza, zinfandel, kale, cocaine, and kombucha: Enough of that, and some weirdly surreal moments are wont to happen, as when Boyle, as if discovering language, writes, " 'bumpy fish' is a code name for bumpy fish. and maybe that's all you need to know." Maybe. Probably. It stands to reason that living in Brooklyn while entertaining such a diet, staying up all night and sleeping all day, and spending your life on the keyboard might impede one's financial progress, and so it is: "dad agreed to give me money for groceries and things," she writes. "seems shitty of me. i'm 27 years old. i'm sick." Dad is always there to help, it seems, and so is Mom, while others in the chronicler's life are less helpful, from the landlord demanding rent to "everyone who doesn't floss regularly." Still, Boyle's log/blog, billed as a novel, is full of zeitgeist-y stuff that will puzzle future historians, punctuated by moments of millennial aspiration, self-direction, and exhortation, from "Do not fuck with me" to "hang up clothes/laundry."A stunt more than a literary achievement; not without merit but requiring more effort than most readers are likely to want to give.

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