A Review of ‘Liveblog’ by Megan Boyle
By: Kimbriah Alfrenar
Tags: Book Recommendations, Books, Books And Authors, Book Review

I will say that this book is hard to get through, and it definitely isn’t something you can read in one sitting. Trying to lug through 707 pages in time for my book club was definitely difficult, even though we had weeks. None of us could finish it in time (I got to page 414) and we agreed that this is the type of book that should definitely be read in chunks, with time for you to process. If you get easily bored with a book, I wouldn’t recommend Liveblog for you. Megan said it herself on the first page:

“**THIS IS NOT GOING TO BE INTERESTING** **I AM NOT GOING TO TRY TO MAKE THIS SOUND INTERESTING OR TRY TO MAKE YOU LIKE ME OR THINK ABOUT IF YOU ARE READING THIS OR ENJOYING READING THIS, IT’S JUST GOING TO BE WHAT IT IS: A FUNCTIONAL THING THAT WILL HOPEFULLY HELP ME FEEL MORE LIKE IMPROVING MYSELF**”

One of the first things I noticed about this book is the mixed use of capitalization. Sometimes she capitalized names, other times she didn’t. Sometimes she capitalized the letter “i”, other times she didn’t. Other times she let her comments fly onto the page with CAPS LOCK ON THE ENTIRE TIME (see above). You could tell that this was genuinely her sitting in front of her computer writing out her thoughts without stopping or thinking too hard about sounding like someone ‘well put together’ by society’s standards.

In a review on the back cover, Juliet Escoria, author of Black Cloud, said:

“Liveblog is a painfully honest and raw record of a person’s life, filtered through a keyboard and not much else”.

That’s part of the reason why this book might not be for everyone. Before reading, I highly suggest you look at the preview that Amazon offers to see if this is something you really want to indulge yourself in. I pushed through the book because I love a challenge and I genuinely wanted to know why Megan made the choices she did, why she felt so unmotivated at times, and whether or not there would be significant character development (I’ll be honest, there wasn’t that much).

My old English teacher, on the other hand, could barely get through the first 100 pages. She was highly annoyed by the number of drugs that Megan Boyle took (it was a concerning amount) and felt that the problems Megan had were that of an unconsciously privileged person. I partially agree. If a person with a darker skin tone or different ethnicity had the same amount of drugs as her or had the same amount of unpaid tickets as her, this story could have potentially been very different. But this book isn’t about race or privilege, so I chose not to focus too much on that.

This book is an inside look at the mind of Megan Boyle in 2013. Reading this gives you the opportunity to learn about the inner thoughts of a 27-year-old woman in a tedious, vulnerable, interesting, but also slightly mundane way. It’s real. It’s life. And life isn’t always the most exciting fun adventure filled with dinosaurs, time travel, and magic. Sometimes life is spending a day in bed with your cats while trying to keep yourself afloat above the depressing thoughts that are threatening to bring you down.