And the Heart Says Whatever

Loved "And the Heart Says Whatever"! A collection of stories that are at once specific and universal. Gould displays an impressive mix of honesty, emotional depth, and humor.

I pre-ordered this book and was pretty excited about getting it only to have it stolen upon delivery. Damn you book thieves! Eventually I retrieved it though and proceeded to read it in one afternoon and evening. I really loved it. Ms. Gould is a lovely writer, very funny and not squeamish about being honest in her portrayal of real-life characters.

I read this book in two hours during my exam week, when I really should have been working on my take-home finals. Something about it kept compelling me to turn the pages. I fall into the right demographic for the book's likely expected audience. I'm a 21-year-old female college student, an aspiring writer, and a self-identified feminist who loves to think about others' internal lives to the point that it really defines my understanding of the world around me. From these details, you'd probably guess that part of the book's appeal to me comes from my identification with the author-narrator, or perhaps from my experience of her story as the glamorous vicarious realization of my own ambitions. While I think you'd be right, I also think there's more to the book's appeal for me, and that the most strikingly wonderful aspects of her writing are bound up with the the almost painful self-consciousness that sometimes limits it. I risk being the bitchy girl in Emily's writing workshop here, but I'm going to offer some criticism with my praise. She is really good at describing her states of mind, her experiences of other people, and the subtle, familiar shifts in her understanding of the world that constitute her becoming as a person. Of the last, her writing reminded me of that paragraph in the Blind Assassin where Atwood writes that moments of incredible courage or betrayal happen so quickly that we must have rehearsed them in the shadows of our mind, over and over again, and that we perform them as though stepping into "a remembered dance." I think Emily's writing makes these rehearsals visible. However, she is not good at giving the reader a picture of the world outside of her mind. Every description gives the impression of something mediated, very self-consciously an element in her story-world, instead of a recording. I read once that adolescence is like a dream. Her book gives the impression that her life is the same way: the experience of it trapped within herself, lit up by moments of almost-immediately frustrated insight into the outside world. This gives a claustrophobic feel to some of her writing. I'm looking forward to the book that she writes when she can tell a story about something in addition to herself. I think it'll happen, and if this book is any indication, it'll be great.

I liked And the Heart Says Whatever a lot. This 28-year-old Brooklynite's sober, sometimes darkly funny reflections on some of the more cringe-inducing scenes from her teens and early twenties resonated with me. This despite my being a full 16 years older than Gould. I found myself nodding, "yes," at her astute observations about many things: the wincingly unavoidable fallibilities of twentysomethings; relationships - with bosses, friends, your first serious boyfriend whom you might have outgrown; what it's like to come of age in publishing and in New York. It probably helps that I had some life and career experiences that were similar to Gould's. It also doesn't hurt that I happen to like this sort of personal essay collection: the kind that comes from a writer who doesn't brandish some story of victimization, extreme ailment or oddity, but is instead just a regular person with a gift for perfectly summing up familiar experiences. I salute Gould for resisting a New School writing instructor's suggestion to, "...look within and ask yourself this question: `How am I a victim?'" along with the common publishing industry dictum to impose an obvious, neatly resolved redemption arc on the collection. I thank her for not presenting another tiresome onslaught of one self-deprecating punch line after another like so many memoirs by women these days. I enjoyed And the Heart Says Whatever in the same way that I enjoyed Michael Greenberg's Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life, another memoir in essays by a writer with a knack for sober summaries that aren't too heavily worked or fussed over.

In the vein of the best "Goodbye to All That"***-esque memoir, Emily Gould's book made me uncomfortable and yearn-y all at once. I just felt like she captured something about being in your twenties; something about being a girl; something about New York; something about hormones. (That "something" might be the pain of being autonomous for the first time, and doing so while hungover.) Bad memoir abounds these days: people like the confessional mode, and it's easing to write personally and luridly, but this book is not that. The humor is surprising and wonderful, the observations are incisive, scary, and don't spare the narrator. I'm sad that I read it so fast. I want a sequel. ***(Referring here to Joan Didion's essay about leaving New York in her twenties, Not Robert Graves, as the commenter below suggests)