I couldn’t wait to read this book because I’ve loved everything else I’ve read by Hall, but I was not as thrilled with this one. It has the same humor and excellent banter I’ve come to expect from Hall, but I couldn’t stand the main character in this one.
If I could have read this book without being stuck in Paris’s head the whole time, I would have liked it a whole lot more. It would have been nice to get to see what Tariq saw in Paris, because I just didn’t get it. Admittedly that’s probably at least partly because you’re in Paris’s head the whole time and Paris doesn’t expect anyone to like him.
Not only are Paris and Tariq very, very different people, but Paris is so completely self-absorbed that I just really wanted to punch him in the face. All the time he spends with Tariq, he’s only ever thinking about all the ways Tariq might hate/judge him. At no point does he think about what Tariq wants, so of course Tariq ended up dumping his ass.
It should be noted that Paris has a crippling level of generalized anxiety disorder, for which he finally gets diagnosed, medicated, and joins group therapy. I would say he also has severe depression, but maybe that’s just me.
There’s a brief mention of the stages Paris has to go through to get help: He has to go to group therapy while he’s on a waitlist to talk to someone 1:1. Having recently been through a similar waiting period to get help with my mental health here in the U.S., I found it interesting to see how the process in England is different from ours and also how it’s similar. I also related real hard to a line about how Paris’s brain is “plotting against him.” I’m stealing that line.
It would have been easy for Hall to make the breakup all Paris’s fault, but I’m glad he resisted the temptation. At one point Paris goes out with Tariq and his family and one of Tariq’s sisters corners Paris and says her brother is attracted to people with issues because he thinks he can fix them and it always ends badly when he realizes he can’t. That turned out to be pretty true and I’m glad Tariq owned up to it in the end.
That said, there was a period before Paris got help when Tariq realized his boyfriend probably had a condition that needed help, but Paris seemed too comfortable with his self-loathing to get the help he needed. Tariq kept explaining away Paris’s behavior as his “brain thing” and I didn’t love that either. It felt reductive and kind of condescending.
There was a side plot regarding Paris’s parents that kept getting mentioned and there were some hints at a history there, but it never got fully explained, and that frustrated me. Eventually Paris figures they just got tired of him, but that’s not a satisfying answer after Hall kept hinting at something more explosive. I’m also not sure getting tired of him explains refusing to answer any of his texts. That level of dedication to ignoring someone requires something much bigger than just boredom.