{"id":2633,"date":"2018-07-08T16:37:50","date_gmt":"2018-07-09T00:37:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=2633"},"modified":"2018-07-08T16:37:50","modified_gmt":"2018-07-09T00:37:50","slug":"review-my-heart-is-an-idiot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=2633","title":{"rendered":"Review: My Heart Is An Idiot"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reading Davy Rothbart’s My Heart Is An Idiot<\/em> felt a lot like plopping down at a neighborhood bar and striking up a conversation with a guy who’s done some fun things and spins a great yarn.\u00a0 Beers are traded, and a perhaps you and he are sucked into another.\u00a0 Rothbart is a down on his luck salt of the earth who you were lucky to meet.<\/p>\n

It’s a con.<\/p>\n

Rothbart built that impression using his immense craft as a writer and unflinching bravery as a storyteller.\u00a0 He structures those yarns like a mathematical proof, pulling the reader along into outlandish situations by presenting each step as part of a natural progression.\u00a0 That’s how you get from “yeah, I’d fly out to Arizona meet a girl I’ve been chatting with online” to dodging traffic while hauling moose legs off a busy highway.\u00a0 Nothing seems unusual until you – almost certainly a lesser writer – try to relate the same story.<\/p>\n

Beyond that, he’s fearlessly honest.\u00a0 Another way these aren’t just bar stories is in the way he talks about himself and his world.\u00a0 His broken and idiotic heart turns up\u00a0 naked and raw and then slips back away. Again, nothing sticks out, but his beliefs and perspective come out in an instant when in life it might take years to get that close. \u00a0 He bares these bits in ways that make it feel like it’s part of a rambling story, and drops back into the story before his shaggy-dog momentum flags.<\/p>\n

As much as the awe-inspiring writing, I like his perspective.<\/p>\n

Strongly recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Davy Rothbart’s My Heart Is An Idiot felt a lot like plopping down at a neighborhood bar and striking up a conversation with a guy who’s done some fun things and spins a great yarn.\u00a0 Beers are traded, and a perhaps you and he are sucked into another.\u00a0 Rothbart is a down on his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2633"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2639,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2633\/revisions\/2639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}