It is hard to explain to a humanist quite how traumatic this discovery would be: imagine, for instance, that someone burned your book manuscript, destroyed your laptop, then sent a poison-pen letter to your publisher.
Wallace, a doctoral candidate in biochemistry, arrives to his lab to find his latest experiment - the result of months of painstaking work and a key part of his senior colleague’s dissertation - sabotaged. Abuse that his parents blamed on him: “my mother . . . slapped me and called me faggot called me sissy . . . said everything except I’m sorry that happened to you.BRANDON TAYLOR’S REAL LIFE follows one late-summer weekend in a Midwestern university town. With friends like these, why does Wallace stick around? One answer - detailed in a visceral, dreamlike flashback - is that he’s running from homophobia and sexual abuse. “There will always be good white people who love him and want the best for him but who are more afraid of other white people than of letting him down.” His nemeses include a fellow gay man sneering at Wallace’s “deficiencies”, and a female colleague fabricating a misogyny complaint. With the rigour of the laboratory, Taylor wields scalpel-like prose, putting human behaviours - along with Wallace’s Petri-dish worms - under the microscope.ĭespite the educated liberal credentials of Wallace’s white friends, they do nothing but stand by each time he is belittled.
Like Taylor, Wallace is black, gay and entered graduate school to study biosciences, his class being “the first in more than three decades to include a black person”.
Why, he asks, is he in college when “I hate it here”? What would constitute the “real life” he craves? Instead, it traces a series of humiliations and emotional reckonings that signal Wallace’s unravelling.
Set over one weekend and told from Wallace’s viewpoint, Real Life is light on exterior “plot”.
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