I guess this is maybe a book review, but it's also a traditional journal entry, since I seem to post here about anything that makes me feel a little bit strange inside or that I just can't seem to get out of my head.
Another reviewer already made the obvious joke about having Joey Comeau inside them, so I should consciously omit it out of courtesy. But
Overqualified by Joey Comeau
is one of those books that gets inside you and that feels like it's brought the author along with (and I not only ended that sentence in a preposition, but also in a distinctly midwestern fashion, so suck it).
I bought Overqualified after Joey Comeau did a reading a Quimby's here two weeks ago. I read the first two-thirds of the book in two brief sittings. I had trouble putting the book down. Then I forced myself to step away and do other things; you know how you sometimes want to savor the last little bit of something particularly tasty, so you force yourself to stop eating in the hopes that when you come back, you'll be able to actually slow down and taste it? I've been staring at this book, wanting to read the last section for days. Tonight, I finally gave in. I was worried it would've gotten stale or spoiled or that the last bit might otherwise not be as good as the first parts. I shouldn't have worried. However, I still gulped it down too quickly, but at least if I want, I can read it again. It's the kind of book that goes down too easy, then sits heavy on your brain. It's like Joey's comic,
A Softer World, which I've fallen totally in love with since picking it back up a few months ago.
So Overqualified is about love and loss and language. It's written as a series of cover letters, composed by a down and out Joey Comeau after his brother has been in an accident. At the reading, Joey assured us that Adrian is alive and well, and that this is just his way of getting back at him for always bitching that Joey never dedicated a book to him. But reading this book, I still wonder. Did Adrian really buy you that jacket you're wearing in the photo you posted in your blog a few days ago? Are you putting us on? Pretending life is full of happy endings, and everyone's okay? I could google and find out, I'm sure, but the fact that I even have that impulse is a testament to the quality of the book. I mean, good fiction tells truths that can only be told through the construction of elaborate lies. And what Joey does with Overqualified is tell all sorts of uncomfortable truths that can only be revealed in fiction, on the internet, or after at least three too many beers. That the man did it in essay form, and possibly sober, and in honest-to-god, fancy-paper print is frightening. And the book is, at times, frightening. Or at least it was for me. It appeals to the part of my brain that still scans the horizons for mushroom clouds during a drive in the country on a clear day.
This is the kind of book I wish I could have written before I'd read it, because now it's inside me and I'll never be the same.
After I started reading Overqualified, I went out and kissed a boy and ate a plate of poutine and listened to nothing but the poppiest twee bands for weeks. I likely would have done all that anyway, but now it seems so much more important.
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