I loved this book, but it also infuriated me. Two years ago, when I was 25, I wrote 80 pages of a pseudo-memoir about how I was 25 and had so far avoided having an actual boyfriend. Now Katie Heaney does the same thing, and SO MUCH BETTER. I’m over my jealousy – this girl is hilarious and we are kindred spirits. Her every observation (whether about 90s kid culture, junior high horror, or college friendships) is so accurate. Her personality, like mine, is perfectly suited to obsessions and inaction. Which is why she’s 25 and hasn’t had a date.
“I just don’t know how anyone ever knows what to do with their bodies. I catch myself worrying about what my arms are doing when I’m walking alone, and that is just walking. Alone.
So I am a basket case, generally, and picky, and have almost always had crushes on people who usually don’t have crushes on me, and it’s rare that I’m so attracted to a stranger that I could imagine having sex with him at that exact moment. And even when that has been true, I am only able to talk about thinking about it, from a safe distance. I have no idea what I’d actually do about it. But generally speaking, I’d like to date someone, at least a little, first. Add all this to my somewhat looming height, an unintentional bracing hostility toward people I don’t know well, and an end to the era in my life when I might have felt the need to do something for the first time to get it over with, and it’s not hard to end up with a twenty-five-year-old who hasn’t had sex. I put practically no effort into it at all.”
