We Are Totally Normal, but no one really likes each other...

I'm going to start this post by proclaiming that I believe in paperback superiority over hardback. I like hardback books in theory, just not in practice. I like looking at them and knocking on them, but they just take up too much space on my shelf. Also, I hate those paper covers. What's the point in making a hardback just to put a paper cover over it?

Now, here’s something you might be thinking: Matthew, what does that have to do with We Are Totally Normal by Rahul Kanakia? And my answer for you would be… nothing. It’s just that my copy of the book is hardback, and I needed to share my thoughts on hardback. (I didn’t need to, but I wanted to lol.)

If you want the video version of this post (CLICK HERE)

Either way, I read We Are Totally Normal by Rahul Kanakia recently, if you haven’t gathered, and here are my thoughts.

So, one of the quotes on the back says this book is, “[a]n endearing, messy, and honest exploration of identity.” And the blurb that’s on the paper liner explicitly states that Nandan, the main character of the book, thinks he has the code to high school figured out, but then he hooks up with his friend, Dave, and that throws him off since he (Nandan) has never really been into guys. Now, my first thought was that this was a clear way to sell the book on what it actually is, and that other books (The Paris Novel) could take hints from it.

In the beginning Nandan has this “project”, which happens to be Dave, where he’s trying to get Dave to hook-up with this girl, Mari, who, side note, ended up being my favourite character in the book. Mari is an icon, a legend, and she is the moment.

Even though Nandan has this project, he and Dave still end up hooking up. Again, that’s not a spoiler, it literally says it on the blurb. And then, after that, I found that Nandan’s character became a little more scattered than he was pre-hook-up. I put that down to the fact that since this book is meant to be an exploration in identity and sexuality, this feeling of Nandan becoming scattered was the beginning of his questioning. But what I did notice was that once Nandan became scattered, everything and everyone around started to become a little scattered themselves. And, again, I feel like this was down to this “code” that Nandan had allegedly cracked about high school was actually wrong, and he hadn’t cracked jack shit.

Time for a smooth transition where I talk about another character, Avani, briefly. So, Avani and Nandan used to sort of be together, kind of but also not really at the same time… I don’t know, their relationship was weird. But I sort of got the vibe that Avani didn’t want to be in the friend group that she was in throughout the book, but at the same time she didn’t actively do anything to change her life or friend group. From her, I got that she wanted or felt like she needed to be popular, but she didn’t seem to enjoy any of the things she had to do to remain popular. She didn’t seem like she was enjoying anything that she ever did. Her character was so frustrating, because I wanted to steer her in a different direction, towards different people so that she could be happier, but obviously, it’s a book so I couldn’t. I sort of just had to watch her be miserable and make bad decisions throughout the book. I don’t know, and I feel like, because she refused to make different decisions, or better decisions, I just ended up not really liking her.

The book mentions that the characters are in Santa Cruz at one point, and I don’t know if this will make much sense, but the characters, Nandan included, gave me a very California vibe. And when I say California vibe, I mean a very specific LA-ish vibe. I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s one of those things that if you know the vibe I’m talking about, it’ll make sense. I don’t want to say annoying specifically, because they weren’t annoying… They were just very "LA". I noticed the more I got into the book, especially around the 90-100 page range, everyone spoke like they needed to be something, instead of just living their lives. It kind of felt like a lot of the characters just had a lot of fake deep conversations, and it didn’t really seem like anyone actually liked each other.

It made me wonder why any of the characters were even friends with each other, they seemed more like friends by proxy – they were friends because they happened to be in the same place at the same time and there was no one else – rather than actual friends.

Anyway, spoiler alert, Nandan and Dave ending hooking up more than once. I wasn’t exactly surprised by them doing this. Given the set-up for the book, I assumed that they would. Now, I don’t want to spoil anything, since this book came out semi-recently, so I’ll phrase it this way: There’s an event that sort of undoes a chunk of the scattered feeling that Nandan and Dave’s first hook-up causes. And as I went on, I felt like the whole book just felt like one big existential crisis. Like, nothing felt stable.

I also felt like Nandan’s friends weren’t really his friends. I mean this in the sense of Nandan, as a character, felt, to me, like he was just floating through life, occasionally interacting with one group of people before floating onto the next one. In chapter 15, Nandan talks about spending time with a bunch of different friend groups. At one point, he is eating lunch with Mari and her friends. During this bit, he mentions that Mari’s friends had no idea who he was and had no concept of the “T99” (something Nandan has essentially made up for the “Top 99” most popular/cool students in the school), and that Mari and her friends were just a group of people who met in freshman year and stayed friends because they had mutual interests. They felt like background characters in a teen movie, but they also felt like normal people. And I felt like Nandan needed normal people in his life.

Nandan seems to spend the second half of the book flip-flopping with his sexuality which I have no problem with, people figure out their sexuality in their own way. But the ending of the book… The only way I’ve come up with to describe it is that the story as a whole was a ball made up of all the events and characters compressed together. Then this ball falls out of the sky and crashes into a lake, and then all the characters and events break apart upon impact. They’re all in the same body of water and within reach of each other, but everything just felt broken.

And I say all of this because I’m not sure how I feel about the ending. I know for a fact that I wasn’t happy with it, but I also wasn’t unhappy with it, but also also, I didn’t feel nothing for it. I suppose that I wish there had been a little more to the end, because I felt like it sort of just happened and was missing that last little extra something that tied it all up. And, if I’m being 100% honest, I feel like I missed something when I reached the end, even though I know for a fact I read everything. But I finished the book and was kind just like, “Alright… I guess that’s how we’re ending…”

I realise that exploring self-identity and sexuality doesn’t have an easy answer for everyone, and that’s the vibe I got from this book – Nandan’s self-exploration wasn’t over by the end of the book, and that was fine! I just wish that the book would have ended even with something along the lines of Nandan saying that he wasn’t quite sure of his identity, but he still had time to figure it out. Something more conclusive than what was actually in the book.

I wish it would have ended like that, because the book ends with Nandan in the space place as a few other characters, and they seem to be the characters that after the events of the book were over, they would end up being his actual friends, as opposed to just friends-by-proxy.

So, yeah, I thought this book was a little confusing in places, but it was confusing due to stylistic choice, not because it was bad. It was a good exploration of identity and sexuality (even if it didn’t have the ending that I personally wanted) and I’d definitely say give it a go for yourself.

            Okay, bye!

(But also, look how pretty this cover is)