Matt McAvoy Book Review

I really like short stories – and I really liked the collection of anecdotes in Not Literary.  Combining autobiography with at times some riotous comedy – about such events as young women being coerced into stripping in a bar and liking it a bit too much, and her almost crippling herself to buy her colleagues donuts – Auriane’s are real crackers.  She takes mundane day-to-day events and squeezes out the laughs; I for one found myself in stitches at times, right from pretty early on.  Her comic narrative is faultless and her yarns are absolute entertainment.  Toward the end, they perhaps start to become a little less unique, and maybe now it would have been nice to see the tales moving in a slightly different direction; I’m no prude, but you do need a somewhat tolerant outlook to continue to get with her experiences of casual sex and casual drugs – by then, I’ll admit they stopped matching the humour punch of the early stages – though, in truth, by then you don’t care; Auriane is endearing.  I read the whole short book in half an afternoon.

She is a great writer, too; I can totally imagine a novel written by her.  A comic-gold, slice of life, anti-chicklit.  She seems to draw the humour from her life in the deep southern states, and lives in direct contrast to any societal expectations; she loves her drugs, her one-night stands; her gay and trans friends and her liberal, broadminded lifestyle.  Thankfully avoiding educating the reader of society’s prejudices, she simply says: “This is how we roll and I love it.”  I’ll admit, I did relive a few of my own less wholesome younger moments reading this, and with a smile.

There are one or two slight mishaps, which could perhaps do with addressing (surely she means Peter Griffin?), and to tell the truth I would like to see Auriane mix it up a little bit: writing styles, prose perhaps, topics, etc. just to keep it fresh.  But one thing she has shown is that she sees the fun in life, in any situation, and is more than able to put it into words.  Laughter on a page would define her writing, and I for one enjoyed every moment of it.