Adam Silvera's writing has hurt me in the following ways...

I don’t remember whether I’ve mentioned this in the five other posts on this blog. But Adam Silvera is my favourite author – and They Both Die at the End is my favourite book of his. Now, while he is my favourite author, his writing has hurt me, multiple times.

    I do mean this in a good way, however.

   Not every book has made me feel something. There have been plenty a book that I have just read, and then moved on with my life because it was just plain okay. Like it wasn’t so bad that it made me feel disappointment, and it wasn’t good that it made me feel something good.

   Anyways, this post comes in the wake of me reading the new, re-release, of Adam Silvera’s More Happy Than Not. The bitch with the extra chapter at the end.

   So my first point is: Oh my god, I forgot how sad this book was. I read it over the course of three days, but in two sittings – the second of which may or may not have been 200 pages… All I’m going to say is, bitch, obviously something was done right if I’m reading 200 pages of a book instead of going and doing something else, like I told myself I was going to. But we live and we learn, and sometimes we spend hours reading a book because it makes you feel many different emotions.

    Prior to my reading of this version of the book, I had only read More Happy Than Not once, and what I remembered from it was that it was sad, but not why it was sad. Then, obviously, I read the re-release, and then I remembered why it was so sad. Now the thing is, I want to talk about the book, but I don’t want to spoil it. So, I am going to apologise if a lot of what I say about the book is vague.

    Also, going into my re-read, I had vague memories of my first read, and vague memories of some of the events – I did remember bits, but it was mostly like I was reading it for the first time again.

    So, I want to give Aaron Soto a hug first and foremost, just for everything he had to endure. Some of the stuff he went through in the book was downright scarring. But, as the book went on, I found myself having a little hope for Aaron, but then I realised that this was a recurring theme in Adam’s writing. I remember thinking the exact thing happening in They Both Die at the End. Like, the title literally tells you the end of the book, but that didn’t stop me from being blindsided when they both died…

     Still, I found myself having hope for Aaron, because of course I did, because I’m, in the words of that one Nicki Minaj meme, I’m a human being. 

     Now, like I mentioned above, I had vague memories of what happened in the story. And coming back to it was like visiting a place I’ve only visited once. There were parts that I remembered, and images I had in my head from the first time I read the book came back. How I thought Comic Book Asylum looked in my head looked the exact same, how the store Aaron worked at, and the block Aaron lived on. It was almost, and I’ll apologise now, like revisiting old memories.

     But then the original ending happened. Ironically, I forgot what the original ending was. And here’s the kicker, since I didn’t remember it, it hurt just as much, if not more, than the first time. Although, given that I didn’t remember it, and the re-release was given a new ending, I figured the original was going to hurt. AND IT DID.

   Luckily, there was the new ending, the extra chapter after the original ending. Now, the only downside I’m going to give to this new ending was that, because I’m a greedy garbage person, I wanted more from it. As in, I just wanted more content. That’s it. There was nothing wrong, realistically, with what was in the new chapter, I just wished there had been more book. So, while I’ve just made the same point twice, what I’m saying is I basically wanted a whole-ass other book. I basically wanted a sequel to what happened afterwards, like a full books-worth of sequel, not just a chapter.

    I suppose that means that a good job was done in the new chapter. It made me want more. And, really, isn’t that what you want for a book? You want something that makes you want to keep reading. That’s exactly what happened after I read this. I mean, there’s a reason that I own every one of Silvera’s books.

    There was a section in the afterword of this book where Silvera talks about wanting to return to Aaron’s voice over the years, but never managed to, for one reason or another. Silvera specifically writes that it was because he “couldn’t find his (Aaron’s) voice”. And, wow, it’s time to be selfish and write about myself, that’s probably one of the worst parts when it comes to writing: the fact you need multiple parts of your brain to all co-operate. You need the want to write and you need to be able to find the voice of who you’re writing. There have been times where I’ve wanted to write, but then when it has come time to open the Word doc of what I’m writing, I’ll just sit and stare at the doc, doing nothing, because I’m not in the right mind frame to write the one specific thing I was writing.

    Also, this is just a separate point to the content of this post. I used to really struggle when I had to write a single, 1,000-word, essay in uni, yet with these blog posts, I can easily get out 1,000 plus words in less than an hour. It’s wild to think how much actually wanting to write about something makes.

    Anyway, go read, literally any of Adam Silvera’s books, I’d highly recommend all of them lmao.

    Okay, bye!