Sunday, 24 January 2010

• Girls in Trucks

  
  

  I just finished reading this book called Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch. I received this book for Christmas after seeing it on the New York Times Bestseller list. Has anyone else read it?

  Long story short, I devoured this book. After the first 120 pages that is. Yes, it took me that long to actually understand the direction in which this book was going. For the first half of the book, I admit, I did not like it. I was taken aback by its vulgarity (also known as brutal honesty), as it was not what I was expecting. Mind you, I have nothing against vulgarity or brutal honesty, especially not in books. But when it hits you in the face, recovery time is crucial.

  Maybe I should back up here. Girls in Trucks is, in a nut shell, a story of how disastrous love can be.
  

  Sarah Walters is a Camellia debutante in Charleston, South Carolina. After losing her virginity to a country boy her senior year of high school, she moves up north, to New York for college. Her college experience is nothing more than a 5 page anecdote--fitting since chances are her memories are a blur of a drunkenness anyway--and then she heads to The City to begin a journalism career. And here, in NYC, her sexual escapades begin.

  Addicted to drugs, alcohol, sex, and love, Sarah finds herself jumping from boy to boy, never really satisfied, and each time, a little more broken. At the end, Sarah, 31, returns to Charleston to care for her newly widowed mother (with the list of men she's slept with totaling over 25), and learns a secret about her own mother's "imperfect" love life.

  I have to admit, I have never been in love. Not romantically, anyway. Hell, I've never even had my first kiss. Yes, that's right. I'm a college girl, and I've never even kissed anyone yet. It's not that I don't want to. It's just that boys are just so damned hard to find. But I digress.

  Love, yes, right. From my experiences, I can't even begin to fathom the heartbreak and torture Sarah experiences in this novel. Romantic love is like another language to me. All I can understand of it, is what I've read in stories and seen in movies. Being the naive, romantic creature that I am, I like to believe in that magic called "true love." That love where two people lock eyes and know, in an instant, that they were meant to be, and want nothing more than to be together. I like to think that love is something that falls from the sky, and hits you over the head so hard, you fall, concussed to delirium and happy. I like to think that this delirious state lasts forever.

  Of course, the realist side of me always has to pick a fight with the romantic side, that bitch, and remind me that nothing's that easy.

  Girls in Trucks is an ode to the realist, reminding those hopeless romantics in us that that concussed delirium, despite the feelings of happiness that might result from it, is still delirium. And when delirious, we don't always think straight. In fact, we can often times hurt ourselves when we succumb to it. Like Charlotte and her heroin addiction. She craved the high, even though she knew the drugs were slowly killing her.

  What are your thoughts on the subject? Have you ever been in love? Do you think of love from the romantic perspective, or the realist? If you've read the book, how accurate do you think Crouch was in her depiction of love?

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