{"id":1095,"date":"2015-05-01T09:00:01","date_gmt":"2015-05-01T13:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.wordpress.com\/?p=1095"},"modified":"2021-08-22T14:13:43","modified_gmt":"2021-08-22T14:13:43","slug":"review-me-and-earl-and-the-dying-girl-by-jesse-andrews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/2015\/05\/01\/review-me-and-earl-and-the-dying-girl-by-jesse-andrews\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl<\/i> by Jesse Andrews"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI learned absolutely nothing from Rachel’s leukemia,\u201d this book\u2019s protagonist starts off in its in-universe foreword, and I grinned and said, \u201cYES! This is going to be good.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cancer books so often frame us pediatric oncology patients as Tragic Figures who Die Beautifully while teaching people Important Lessons. I can\u2019t tell you how marvelous<\/em> it is to read one that tries for none of that.<\/p>\n

\"Cover<\/a><\/center><\/div>Rachel\u2019s cancer does not imbue anyone or anything with deeper meaning. It is not beautiful. Not even tragically beautiful. There\u2019s nothing good about her cancer \u2014 it just sucks. It sucks, and it\u2019s unfair, and she\u2019s going to die, and she wasn\u2019t anybody special or extraordinary or wise, except in the way that everyone\u2019s life is unique and worthy and has meaning, and somehow that makes it suck more<\/i>. She\u2019s not some deeply philosophical being who finds profundity in her death. She\u2019s just a girl, a very real girl, who likes posters of hot movie stars and frilly pillows and has big teeth and is sometimes awkward and laughs a lot, and is dying. And it sucks.<\/em><\/p>\n

And I can\u2019t tell you how refreshing it is to have a book that acknowledges this \u2014 that there\u2019s not some greater purpose or meaning in cancer. That it hits you and you don\u2019t suddenly start spouting (as the book phrases it), \u201csugary paradoxical single-sentence-paragraphs that you\u2019re supposed to think are deep because they\u2019re in italics.\u201d Life keeps going on and being life, except with the extra added twist that there\u2019s this stupid disease<\/em> eating you from the inside out and fucking you up, and there\u2019s no higher meaning in that.<\/p>\n

(When I got my second cancer diagnosis a close friend of mine emailed with, \u201cTotal balls … There’s not much else to say,\u201d and I thought that was the perfect response. Because there really isn\u2019t<\/em> much else to say.)<\/p>\n

(spoilers follow)<\/em><\/p>\n

The story of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl<\/i><\/a> by Jesse Andrews starts out with Greg\u2019s \u2014 our protagonist\u2019s \u2014 mother forcing him to reconnect with the recently-diagnosed Rachel, a girl he used to hang out with in Hebrew school and whom he briefly dated years ago to make another girl jealous. Greg has no interest in trying to befriend Rachel, and she has zero interest in visiting with him.<\/p>\n

They eventually start hanging out a bit, and at first it\u2019s exceedingly awkward. Their somewhat forced friendship never grows into anything earth-shattering, but it does eventually achieve the level of something real … before Rachel passes away from her leukemia.<\/p>\n

The book practically makes a point of turning every single \u201cchild with CANCER! Deep! Meaningful! Profound!\u201d trope completely on its head. To wit:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Rachel gets no grand love story (either platonic or romantic). She and Greg do develop a sort of friendship, but it\u2019s not even a kindred spirit friendship for the ages \u2014 it\u2019s a friendship that means something, yes, but not everything. Far from it, in fact.So if this were a normal book about a girl with leukemia, I would probably talk a shitload about all the meaningful things Rachel had to say as she got sicker and sicker, and also probably we would fall in love and have some incredibly fulfilling romantic thing and she would die in my arms. But I don\u2019t feel like lying to you. She didn\u2019t have meaningful things to say, and we definitely didn\u2019t fall in love. (p. 196)<\/em><\/li>\n
  2. Rachel doesn\u2019t become a wizard who is able to solve everyone\u2019s problems and make them see the light just because of her dying state. She tries to get Greg and his friend Earl both to promise to go to film school and pursue their movie-making hobby professionally, but it doesn\u2019t really work. After her death, when Greg considers doing as she asked, Earl calls him out on it and tells him he has to live his life for himself, not for things Rachel said.Later, when Greg goes back to considering film as a career, it is very clearly his own decision, born of an evolution that includes everything in his life \u2014 including Rachel, but including everything and everyone else around him too, and probably Earl most of all.\n

    \u201cThis is the first … negative <\/b>thing that has happened to you in your life. And you can\u2019t be overreacting to it and making big-ass expensive decisions based on it. I\u2019m just saying. People die. […] But you gotta live your own life.\u201d (Earl to Greg when he considers letting Rachel\u2019s death affect his life decisions, p. 288)<\/em><\/li>\n

  3. Rachel is not tough. She\u2019s not a good little soldier who\u2019s an inspiration. In fact, she eventually gives up.The fact that Rachel stops her treatment is not portrayed as an admirable decision, but nor is it portrayed as a mistake. It\u2019s shown without judgment \u2014 this is the decision she and her family came to, and that\u2019s their business.\n

    She was never much of a fighter. She\u2019s always been a quiet girl, just so sweet, never wanting to fight […] I raised a girl who\u2019s sweet, and . . . and lovely, but not tough. (Rachel\u2019s mother to Greg, p. 226-7)<\/em><\/li>\n

  4. Rachel\u2019s death is not framed as depriving the world of someone extraordinary \u2014 except that makes it all the more so. We rail at the waste of losing her<\/i> and everything that makes her her,<\/i> not of losing some Person of Destiny with a nebulous higher calling.[…] it made me so bitter and fucking angry […] she was just going to be lost.<\/b> Just as if she had never been around to say things and laugh at people and have favorite words that she liked to use and ways of fidgeting with her fingers when she got antsy and specific memories that flashed through her head when she ate a certain food or smelled a certain smell like, I dunno, how maybe honeysuckle made her think of one particular summer day playing with a friend or whatever the fuck, or how rain on the windshield of her mom\u2019s car used to look like alien fingers to her, or whatever,<\/b> and as if she had never had fantasies about stupid Hugh Jackman or visions of what her life was going to be like in college or a whole unique way of thinking about the world that was never going to be articulated to anyone. (p. 278)<\/em><\/li>\n
  5. When Rachel dies, Greg\u2019s mother apologizes for pushing him to be friends with Rachel after her diagnosis. They\u2019re sitting in the hospital, both crying, and his mom apologizes.<\/i> It\u2019s such a terrifically honest and human moment.(Compare this to The Fault In Our Stars<\/i> and its repeated affirmation that \u201cloving a grenade\u201d is always worth it.)<\/li>\n
  6. Rachel dies, and Greg gets past it. So does everyone else. Life moves on. Rachel\u2019s death is an awful, awful day, but that day ends.There\u2019s something magnificently healthy in this to me.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    There\u2019s nothing grand or meaningful about Rachel\u2019s death. Cancer didn\u2019t make her see life more clearly. It didn\u2019t make anyone around her discover revolutionary truths about themselves. She was not a person of stunning intellect or great beauty or shining destiny \u2014 she was a girl who would have liked to keep hanging out with her friends and crushing on Hugh Jackman.<\/p>\n

    She was amazing.<\/p>\n

    \n

    There\u2019s one other thing I particularly love about this book, and that\u2019s how realistically it portrays people\u2019s reactions to cancer \u2014 starting with Greg\u2019s mother\u2019s do-gooding and through Greg\u2019s utter awkwardness and Madison\u2019s well-meaning charity. And Earl. I want to talk about Earl for a moment.<\/p>\n

    How people treated me as a child with cancer is one of the pieces of the experience I am most acutely conscious of. When you\u2019re a kid with cancer, everyone<\/i> cares. They all care so freakin\u2019 much until you want to spit in their eyes when they swoop in and ask \u2014 nay, demand \u2014<\/i>\u00a0how you\u2019re doing. It\u2019s awful.<\/p>\n

    But then there are the people who are no-bullshit-sincere about it, and it\u2019s hard to quantify what makes them okay but they are<\/i>, they\u2019re more than okay, they\u2019re incredible. <\/i>I think it\u2019s something about seeing us as people <\/i>rather than Cancer Kids, but those were the people I loved more than I can say, more than they might ever know. Those were the people whose cards I kept and whose visits I wanted. And Earl is one of those people toward Rachel, those no-bullshit-sincere people, and I don\u2019t know how Jesse Andrews did it, but I just want to give him a medal for nailing that.<\/p>\n

    (I love everything about Earl, by the way. Angry, obscene, smack-talking cigarette-smoking Earl, whom Greg constantly acknowledges is a better person than he is \u2014 and he\u2019s right.<\/i>)<\/p>\n

    I wish more people understood cancer this way.<\/p>\n

    How I would rate this book:
    \n<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Overall:<\/em> 4 stars (My only large criticism is that Greg\u2019s narration got on my nerves at times, particularly his insecurity and misogyny, but Earl\u2019s speech 3\/4 of the way through calling him out on exactly these things knocked things so far out of the park that it pulls this up from a 3.5 to a solid 4.)<\/p>\n

    Portrayal of childhood cancer:<\/em> Excellent<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    \u201cI learned absolutely nothing from Rachel’s leukemia,\u201d this book\u2019s protagonist starts off in its in-universe foreword, and I grinned and said, \u201cYES! This is going to be good.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":1117,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_generate-full-width-content":"","kt_blocks_editor_width":""},"categories":[62,522],"tags":[142],"genre":[5],"age_category":[8],"disability":[143],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1095"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1095"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7300,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1095\/revisions\/7300"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1095"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=1095"},{"taxonomy":"age_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/age_category?post=1095"},{"taxonomy":"disability","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disability?post=1095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}