Tag: Good Material

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪.5
Genre: Fiction

My previous experience with Dolly Aldteron’s writing (Ghosts) was NOT my thing, but I am SO glad I have her another chance. Her writing in Good Material is impeccable: funny, SO relatable, unexpected. I found myself literally wanting to copy down passages from this book.

At face value, not much happens in this book. It follows the fallout after Jen and Andy’s breakup, primarily from his perspective. Andy is shattered after suddenly losing the love of his life and struggles to pick himself back up with very little clarity on what happened to end their relationship.

The story explores his personal life and his career as a struggling comedian and how everything is infiltrated with thoughts of Jen. It summed up so well the difficulty of disentangling yourself from someone your life has been thoroughly intertwined with. Andy is not a likeable main character, but that really made the book work for me. It felt realistic in the sense that he seemed like an actual struggling human. 

I was pleasantly surprised to get Jen’s perspective at the end of the book and what a breath of fresh air. It put all of Andy’s reflections into context. Jen is opposed to the societal pressure to be in a relationship because that’s what you’re ‘supposed’ to do. I loved how different her perspective was from Andy’s and I wish we’d gotten a bit more from her. That said, I thought the unequal distribution of the narration worked really well for the book. It highlighted how one person experiences a breakup and how their thoughts on the situation are completely based on themselves and are never the full picture.

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