There are days that change your life, and this is definitely one of those days. The world has turned a somersault, you feel like you are someone else. Your senses are touching a heightened state. Nothing looks or smells or even tastes the same. You float around like you’re on some sort of hallucinogenic drug. You’ve never felt so alive. A powerful love for the world has gripped you. The evening light falling upon the city has a poetic quality to it, the long line of traffic up ahead has artistic merit, and for the first time since adolescence you feel inspired to attempt a poem. That raw nerve has been touched. This day needs to be perpetuated.
Before you met him, weeks and months used to glide past without you taking any particular notice, but [n]ow every moment seems highly charged, precious, there to be grasped and lived.
It’s after you had turned fourteen and fallen in love for that breathtaking first time. Speaking aloud to an imaginary camera, you reminisce on how close you came ot saying something to Eamonn O’Neill. How could you ever foget that name. The pair of you were inseparable, the purest of friendships. You’ve never had a friendship like it since, and something tells you even now that he was as much in love with you as you were with him. Anything that happened, your first thought was of telling him, of watching his animated reaction. And it was just after that fourteenth birthday when his family moved house, away down to the west of Ireland. One hundred and sixty miles away to be precise. The night before he left, the two of you kicked a football around on the road with all the others, the same way you did any summer night. At ten o’clock, with the long twilight turning to darkness, he said goodbye, and before he went into his house, he stood in front of you, neither of you knowing what to do or say. The moment is still so vivid. How were you to know that you would never look into those eyes again? The opportunity slipped by, you didn’t have the words to say. And you went to bed and cried yourself to sleep.
It’s like a logjam has been cleared and the river is flowing along at the pace it ought to flow at. Your energy is no longer sapped up and wasted by the effort involved in leading that double-life. Now you know that you are finally moving on to wherever it is you are going.
god this book literally kills me. the way Lennon articulates this range of gay emotions is so intense and so profoundly relatable, even to me as someone who hasn’t really been closeted the way Paul is since high school. the second person narration sweeps us into Paul’s obsession and also into the wonder of “every moment [...] highly charged, precious, there to be grasped and lived” and every time I had to put the book down I left it feeling like everything around me was as charged with emotion as the book is.
it is, I feel, natural to compare this with Lennon’s other novel: where When Love Comes to Town is intensely and powerfully validating in its bitterness, Crazy Love is, for all its claustrophobia and stifledness, simultaneously so wonderfully, beautifully open — it is a story about opening, about learning not simply how to love but that you are capable of loving, after so much time both denying love and being denied the very possibility of it. I need When Love Comes to Town as a reminder that I am not alone, and I need Crazy Love to renew my faith that the vertiginous but ambiguous potential at the end of Neil’s story can, in fact, be more than just potential.
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