saraisabelhoyos

I read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter my Freshman year of college in what turned out to be a rather disenchanting lit survey course. (In a particularly bad turn, I was accused of plagiarism--wrongly, I might add--because the instructor thought my knowledge of biblical symbolism was somehow 'unlikely.') Even so, this book still managed to strike a really profound chord with me. It's sweet and poetic and vulnerable and observant and tragic and I probably underlined it with embarassingly wild abandon. It truly solidified my love of the gorgeous and romantic genre of the Southern Gothic and had me convinced that if I had not written my Great American Novel by 23--as did Carson McCullers--I would be a complete failure. Well, turns out, the only thing I had to be by 23 was--in the immortal words of Ethan Hawke--myself, but I still believe that this is one of the best books ever written. Now, granted, I haven't read it since that first time. But I have started a collection of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter paperbacks (they're all so wonderful!), which may actually make it harder for me to re-read it. After all, I'm going to feel pretty silly if I end up with 12 different copies of a book that isn't really that great. But I won't. Because it's lovely.

2022-11-22 11:55