Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
Jesse Andrews
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Synopsis from Goodreads-
Greg Gaines is the last master of high school espionage, able to disappear at will into any social environment. He has only one friend, Earl, and together they spend their time making movies, their own incomprehensible versions of Coppola and Herzog cult classics.
Until Greg’s mother forces him to rekindle his childhood friendship with Rachel.
Rachel has been diagnosed with leukemia—-cue extreme adolescent awkwardness—-but a parental mandate has been issued and must be obeyed. When Rachel stops treatment, Greg and Earl decide the thing to do is to make a film for her, which turns into the Worst Film Ever Made and becomes a turning point in each of their lives.
And all at once Greg must abandon invisibility and stand in the spotlight.
So, this is the third time I've read this book, and I read it for the third time for 2 reasons: a) it's my favourite book, and b) the MOVIE IS OUT SOON.
Don't go into this thinking it's the new The Fault in our Stars, because it's NOT. It's insensitive, immature and kind of gross at times. But it is hilarious. Every time I've read it, I have always laughed my head off the whole way through.
Greg is not that great a person sometimes, but he has a good heart, and while Earl seems like a bit of a thug, he is actually a really good person, and gets to know Rachel and understands her.
Even though Rachel does die, it isn't presented in a sad manner- it's emotional, but kind of awkwardly emotional more than anything.
I love how you don't have to take this book seriously but it does have some good messages in it.
You have to be kind of twisted and weird to appreciate this book to its extreme- lots of people hated it because they expected a sad, heart-warming, romantic story that teaches you how precious and meaningful life is- do NOT expect that.
Honestly, this is a brilliant book, and I will reread it about 100 more times in the future. Also, can't wait for the movie!
Quotes
“The most beautiful thing about you is that you’re not a sock puppet.”
“it's just never a good idea to compliment a girl's boobs. [...] "You have nice boobs." Bad. "You have two nice boobs." Worse. "Two boobs? Perfect." F minus.”
“I'm not really putting this very well. My point is this: This book contains precisely zero Important Life Lessons, or Little-Known Facts About Love, or sappy tear-jerking Moments When We Knew We Had Left Our Childhood Behind for Good, or whatever. And, unlke most books in which a girl gets cancer, there are definitely no sugary paradoxical single-sentence-paragraphs that you're supposed to think are deep because they're in italics. Do you know what I'm talking about? I'm talking about sentences like this:
The cancer had taken her eyeballs, yet she saw the world with more clarity than ever before.
Barf. Forget it. For me personally, things are in no way more meaningful because I got to know Rachel before she died. If anything, things are less meaningful. All right?”
“If after reading this book you come to my home and brutally murder me, I do not blame you.”
“Girls like good-looking guys, and I am not very good-looking. In fact, I sort of look like a pudding.”
“I entered Excessive Modesty Mode. Nothing is stupider and more ineffective than Excessive Modesty Mode. It is a mode in which you show that you’re modest by arguing with someone who is trying to compliment you. Essentially, you are going out of your way to try to convince someone that you’re a jerk.”
“There was just something about her dying that I had understood but not really understood, if you know what I mean. I mean, you can know someone is dying on an intellectual level, but emotionally it hasn't really hit you, and then when it does, that's when you feel like sh-t.”
“We used to be pretty good friends, but fourteen-year-old girls are psychotic.”
“And the point of Rachel the Film should really have been to express how awful and sh-tty that loss was, that she would have become a person with a long awesome life if she had been allowed to continue living, and that this was just a stupid meaningless loss, a mother-cking loss, a loss loss loss f-cking loss, there was no f-cking meaning to it, there was nothing that could come out of it...”
“Usually it's when your guard is down that you find yourself saying the most dick sentences of your life.”
“There are two kinds of hot girls: Evil Hot Girls, and Hot Girls Who Are Also Sympathetic Good-Hearted People and Will Not Intentionally Destroy Your Life (HGWAASGHPAWNIDYL).”
“When girls see two Unattractives dating, they think, 'Hey! Love is possible even for unattractive people. They have to love different things about each other than their physical appearances. That's so sweet.' Meanwhile, dudes see it and think, 'That is one less guy I have to compete with for the most succulent boobs in the Boob Competition that is high school.”
“So the rich kids aren't the alpha group of the school. The next most likely demographic would be the church kids: They're plentiful, and they are definitely interested in school domination. However, that strength -- the will to dominate -- is also their greatness weakness, because they spend so much time trying to convince you to hang out with them, and the way they try to do that is by inviting you over to their church. 'We've got cookies and board games,' they say, or that sort of thing. 'We just got a Wii set up!' Something about it always seems a little off. Eventually, you realize: These same exact sentences are also said by child predators.”
“So if this were a normal book about a girl with leukemia, I would probably talk a sh-tload about all the meaningful things Rachel had to say as she got sicker and sicker, and also probably we would fall in love and have some incredibly fulfilling romantic thing and she would die in my arms. But I don't feel like lying to you. She didn't have meaningful things to say, and we definitely didn't fall in love. She seemed less pissed with me after my stupid outburst, but she basically just went from irritable to quiet.”
FIN
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