i showered before i sat down and read serious weakness for the last four hours, now i am dripping with sweat, and i have cried real tears. finally, i can read a description that explains what it feels like to have a body, what it feels like to be alive, and what the world is. i can finally read something that’s fucking real.

i have completed serious weakness, a book i saw in three different awesome gay women's bedrooms, which was heretofore only described to me in a direct quote when i first picked it up as “that book’s insane.” it would be a crime to spoil, so i refuse to spoil any aspect of it. i’m going to speak incredibly vague and nebulously, so please bear with me. i will write a review with spoilers if anyone asks me for one.

i read a few pages and it seemed pretty normal to me. i put it down for some reason i don’t remember. the name “insul” stuck with me. i kept thinking it probably every few days at least. that was about six months ago.

about 24 hours ago, i decided i was going to try reading it again. i read a third of the book immediately. it was probably 7:00 am when i knew i had to stop, though i knew i would finish it the next day. when a story begs me to keep reading it, i feel intoxicated. there’s nothing else in this world that brings me the propulsion of having a book i want to keep reading. some small part of me is always begging to ration it out and the rest of me has an uncontrollable thirst that is screaming to be slaked, so i listen to that part.

i read the rest of it tonight in a single sitting, broken up only by a break of maybe 15 minutes to do my daily writing (in a style that was clearly inspired and lubricated by this book, so i’m very grateful to it)

i have to say, in a way, serious weakness made me feel like i was inside it. i found myself asking all the same questions the characters were (sometimes before they did), and comparing it to my own life. this book is too real and authentic for me to recommend it to many people, because i just think they couldn’t take it. i'm too tired to figure out a way to make that not sound like a jerk sentence, so just trust me that i don't mean it in a bad way. they’d just get caught up in themselves and get stinging sensations in their eyes or feel sick to their stomach and just not be able to read anymore because their thoughts would be too loud. i don't blame them. for the people who can read serious weakness, i probably can’t do anything to recommend it enough. i think the art that affects us most will always be the art that pushes our boundaries as much as possible while still letting us experience it, toying with a limit, not pushing so hard as to break us. art that helps us find where we end and the rest of the world begins. reading serious weakness made me feel seen and delineated in that way.

i don’t think i’ve ever seen a story as well-named as serious weakness. i found myself regularly thinking about the title as i was reading the story and being like, “yeah, this is serious weakness.” i can’t wait to think that while i go about my daily physically weak life.

reading serious weakness forced me to grapple with my own perceptions of what it could possibly mean to want something, why we want the things we want, how the act of wanting in itself changes a person, and how wanting something changes the nature of the things you want as soon as you get them.

reading serious weakness made me feel like i was flirting with someone, because it made me feel, in real-time, the disconnect between my body, heart, mind, and soul. i felt the dissonance of a gut-feeling on how i was supposed to interpret something, mixed with the nagging part of my mind that tells me “you’re doing something wrong”, combined with love that wanted to spring forth, with a not unkind helping of naturalization as i felt like i became the story that was on the page. maybe, in that moment, it was stronger than me, so i felt like i had to merge with it. haha. that was just a joke.

serious weakness, like all media that i truly adore, made me feel psychotic while i experienced it. it made me feel detached from the reality i live in because of how intensely i was living in a different one. it made me feel like a horrible person who can do horrible things. i think everyone has some horrible part like that in them, and this story made me feel closer to mine than i usually am; it also gave me an environment in which i could tenderly stroke the hair of that part of me, give it a small cramped cellar in which to breathe, and some room to convalesce.

i can’t tell you how many times i cried while reading serious weakness, but it was definitely more than 3. i loved this story inside and out, and can’t wait to find out who i know has read it so i can talk to them about it. i can’t wait for it to influence my writing going forward, as some of the things in it were ideas for directions i already wanted to go, but i wasn’t quite sure how to implement. i took more notes for things i wanted to write about while reading this than i ever have for anything before.

i will henceforth not describe this book using any genre labels, as i am opposed to their existence. i’ll give it an easy 5 out of 5 stars.