A few years prior to Would You Rather?, Kate Heaney published a memoir about never having had a boyfriend at the age of 25. Now, she returns with another soul searching autobiography, which focuses on an amazing realization: she’s gay.
I related with a lot in Heaney’s first book. Unlike her, I was not single at the age of 25 — instead, I got married at nineteen to the first guy I ever dated because I was so awkward and uncomfortable with myself that I latched on to the first person willing to push past that. And then basically did whatever he wanted until I was 31 and he decided it was time to go manipulate someone else. Heaney’s awkwardness and discomfort is not the cutesy kind you see in romcoms, where all the girl needs is a little lipstick and then she comes out of her shell. Heaney is painfully self-aware, and convinced that any little thing that could go wrong, will go wrong, so she just…doesn’t.
So, in this book, Heaney talks a lot about what life has looked like since she published her first. She seems incredibly touched by how many people she reached, but also discusses how writing a book about being single because you’re bad at dating just makes dating harder in the future. And then she starts to dive into the self-examination that eventually leads her to take a few baby steps towards dating women — checking a different box on Tinder. Flirting with different people. And ultimately, finding love with a woman.
I didn’t quite like this book as much as the first, but not because I couldn’t relate to it. I’m straight (or mostly, anyway), and have exclusively dated men since my divorce. But obviously, we don’t read books only when the author’s life looks like ours (pretty much the opposite really). What I didn’t like as much about this follow up in how very concerned Heaney is about how she presents herself to her audience, while lacking the self-awareness to see how she interacts with the actual people in her life. I don’t mean her sexual orientation — I can totally see how someone can be raised in a way that would make it difficult or impossible to recognize those kinds of feelings in themselves — but instead the way that she appears to realize she’s gay, almost immediately meet a woman, fall intensely for that woman, and then (or at least this is how she presents herself in her writing) completely blow off everyone else in her life. It just kind of rubbed me the wrong way, and after reading some other reviews on Goodreads, and can see that others felt the same way.
However, there are definitely people out there who will be able to relate to and benefit from Heaney’s writing, and I commend her for once again tackling what must have been an incredibly difficult subject with such introspection.