Paradise Logic

Back in October, I stumbled upon fairygore's review of Paradise Logic. The review is good so check it out, and it really caught my attention - especially because it's written in a way that is appreciative of the book's writing style. That's a really fun way of writing a review!

This book has a very specific way with its words, at times I found it funny but I can't shed the fact that the background of the story, it's foundation, is based on an upper middle class background totes punk and raunchy girl in New York. That's just, such an unlikeable type of person lmfao. But really, I would be lying if I said the book wasn't enjoyable. Reality's (the mc) voice and turns of phrase are really entertaining. Reality is kind of an amalgamation of a very particular era and brand of a post-uni kind of womanchild. She operates on an absurd level that is expected of someone like her, she's slutty, she sleeps around, she's a baby fuck doll, she does photoshoots for money, her life probably more than partially bankrolled by her parents. Her hygiene is disturbingly godawful, but somehow she's perfectly ready for fucking all of the time. Her fashion is quirky and she makes zines and her iq is low. She lives off junk food and hardly eats. She's a parody of a contemporary kind of alt young woman that comes from a modern equivalent of a low aristocratic family taken to the extreme. She's probably not really worried financially or existentially, she has a good family backed financial net to fall back on so she only needs to worry about who to fuck and get drugs from. She loves larping poverty at punk shows, and she's ~in the know~. What is different about her is that she uses weird expressions and perspectives when approaching themes such as dating, having sex, anything really - but she is aware of how everything works. Aware on many levels. She's aware of the necessary humiliation, that you're supposed to have sex when you don't want to, that you need to pretend to be a sexy infant, all of that. All of those uncomfortable truths that come with being a DIY venue pickme (Sophie's own words), or any woman looking to get fucked to find a boyfriend. Sure, she words things in a funny way that sounds autistic, but she doesn't have any issues performing these actions and becoming a perfect girlfriend. She's merely operating on high a level of absurdity, she's a caricature.

Why did I feel the need to write those last those sentences in the first paragraph? Well, because something has really irked me when reading about this book online. The sheer amount of people calling Reality autistic or neurodivergent, or even better, calling the author autistic was more absurd than the book itself. I even found a tweet by the author kind of making fun of being called autistic and tagged as a #neurodivergentauthor. I encountered something similar in regards to the cover as well, with people being completely shocked how such a cover was allowed and thinking it was completely earnest. It's not like this book is a deep parody that is hard to comprehend either, and in fact it's completely fine to criticize it for being a bad obvious parody or something, but to miss the point completely is something I didn't expect people to do at all. Like really, you think a cover with the authors name in comic sans and an anime girl and a guy with a hipster beard is earnest?

So much yapping and I didn't even say what the book is about! I think it can be best summed up by none other than the author's own words from a year before the book came out, coming from a 2024 article she wrote on radicalization of young and online men. While describing what the usual ideological path of the average young men is nowadays, she included a pretty short sentence for what women's trajectory usually is too:

For girls, it is like this: I want to be liked by men; I do what I can to recreate myself in their image.

That's about it. The book is about one such girl, Reality. She wants to be the perfect girlfriend. And she does stupid and humiliating things to get there.

So, even though I think Sophie Kemp comes from a geographical and socio-economical caste of people I could stand to hear less from, I liked this book. I try not to be an asshole about this but sadly I feel like the environment of this book is just so reliant on this fact. Buuuut I like her humor and satire, and I liked the journey and how Reality talks about things. The story by itself is really nothing standout, but the presentation is what really makes it.