get a life, chloe brown by talia hibberts
I finally read this book!!! I put it off for so long because I'm so picky about contemporary romance – but this was a delight, doubly so because I read the book alongside the audio and the narrator adjoa andoh is just fabulous.
get a life, chloe brown is the first in talia hibberts' brown sisters series. this one follows eldest sister chloe as she attempts to, as the title of the book would suggest, "get a life."
chloe is a chronically ill web designer who basically never leaves the house. after nearly getting hit by a car one day and imagining the eulogy at her funeral, she decides to make a change and awaken the adventurous, exciting version of herself. she moves out of the family mansion and makes a list of things to help her "get a life." a drunken night out. going camping. meaningless sex... but when you're a girl who prioritizes her comfort and safety (physical and emotional), a life of adventure and risk is easier said than done. so she enlists redford morgan – her exciting, motorcycle-riding, tattooed painter-turned-building super – for help.
silly shenanigans, honest depictions of chronic pain, and lowkey heart-wrenching trauma tied to abandonment and class and self-worth ensue.
a brief ode to adjoa andoh
this book has it all – and I have to take a minute to give credit to adjoa andoh for bringing it to life so well.
her voice is haughty one moment, unguarded the next; she captures talia hibberts' wry humor so well but also tempers it so that those emotionally exposed moments really shine.
in fact, I sort of wonder whether I would've loved get a life, chloe brown so much if not for her narration...
at times the tone felt a smidge too blithe for my tastes. the writing in this book is very humorous, deliberately droll. in this case, it's a reflection of chloe brown's personality – she's dry and sardonic and emotionally avoidant, due in part to a few too many relationship disappointments. and humor can mask a lot of things.
She hadn't always been like this, a tongue with the tip bitten off, her feelings squashed into a box. But help and concern, even from the people she loved – even when she needed it – had a way of grating. Of building up, or rather, grinding down.
if I had only been reading the book, maybe I would've tired of the mask much more quickly – I suspect adjoa andoh added a lot of life and humanity into the words.
that aside, I really enjoyed the premise of the book. chloe's "get a life" list created all these little opportunities for her to introspect and learn more about what she really wants. I felt like I was seeing her self-concept grow and expand bit by bit, which made it feel a lot more believable and real.
and I liked that red was there alongside her – facilitating the experiences, making them happen in a way that took her needs into full consideration; being her wingman, so to speak, but never performing the growth for her. he was a soundboard, but she was learning and discovering and figuring things out on her own.
I've read that talia hibbert loves her heroines, and she works really hard to ensure that they go through full journeys, supported by men who are devoted to them. I really felt that here.
that's not to say that red is just some cardboard NPC who exists solely for the purpose of being chloe's rock. he goes through his own journey toward growth, too. it starts with his relationship to painting – overcoming the obstacles that have led him away from his public art career and into his position as superintendent.
He hadn't produced anything like his old stuff. He'd forgotten to even try. In front of him was a vivid, half dream, half nightmare of a landscape, the kind that made him feel flushed and frantic and reckless. So he had his answer. He'd lost himself. He took a moment to breathe through that realization, to sit with the finality of it. Oddly, it didn't choke him. In fact, knowing it once and for all felt a little like lifting a weight.
red is this kind of stalwart figure in the book – yes, he has his challenges to overcome, but we're almost tricked into thinking those challenges are small. like he's just lost, or he's just taking time to figure out his calling... as we continue on in the book, we get glimpses of just how deep his trauma really goes. because it's never actually just about the one thing, is it? the past always carries far more weight than we think it does.
and I actually that's so brilliant of talia hibberts! because here we are thinking this is a romantic book with a cinnamon roll hero (well, grouchy in tone, but cinnamon roll in behavior), when really both red and chloe have their relationship baggage to carry, and their particular issues clash with each other so realistically and catastrophically that the stakes feel impossibly high when everything comes to a head. and we can't say we were blindsided, because in our heart of hearts, we knew something like this was possible all along.
a few days ago, I came across an old reddit thread where a reader was talking about the brown sisters books and questioning the equity in the relationships. she felt like all the male love interests brought a lot more to the table than the female leads; she didn't buy into the romance, didn't feel it was reciprocal.
I was reflecting on that as I read this book. I can see how it looks like red is doing a lot for chloe – I mean, I guess he is. a lot of people would walk away from a disabled partner – as chloe well knows. maybe they think of accommodations as sacrifice or inconvenience and they're not interested in the work.
but I thought chloe and red's relationship was really meaningful and mutual. it clearly felt satisfying to both chloe and red...? and it was filled with the little things that matter and often get taken for granted. I dunno, it's just little things – like being there, being part of someone's experience in life, paying attention to how they are, what they say, what they think.
like, take red's presence at chloe's drunken night out and the motorcycle ride and the camping – him being part of those moments, having his own experience that he's processing, wanting to know what she's thinking too, actually being someone she can talk to about it all – those things feel throwaway sometimes, but it's not nothing. being a witness to someone's life, sticking around, is not nothing.
and vice versa – maybe chloe doesn't make these loud grand gestures, but she sees him. a lot of the work she does is "invisible" work, emotional labor, that I think is vitally important in allowing red to see himself and his past through a new lens. she validates his experience, she refuses to let him minimize it.
She stiffened. "You were hurt, and you reacted. You were in an unhealthy situation in more ways than one, and you panicked and cleansed everything with fire. Don't dismiss your emotions and your self-protection as just a fucked-up decision. Don't reduce something so complex and real and important to nothing."
I mean, is she not playing therapist with him, just a little? and doesn't her emotional support & steadiness matter?
anywayyyyy. I really liked this book, and I liked chloe even though I wasn't sure I would. she definitely gives big sister energy, which I absolutely do not relate to, but I do connect with the idea of "life before" and "life after," of having needs that are inconvenient at best, of feeling reticent and ill-prepared to be a participant of the world.
I think when you are disabled, you sometimes maybe look at things that other, non-disabled people have, and you think those things are out of reach for you. whether it's due to disheartening experiences you've had, or because you think you're less-than or too-much, or whatever it may be...
"I'm the kind of person who hurts. Too much."
"No," Gigi corrected calmly. "You are a woman who, in a life filled with pain, came her to ask about love."
but I find it gratifying to watch chloe venture out, to recognize her own bravery, to meet someone who wants to care for her not out of pity but because that's just who he is – and for her to be someone who has something he needs, too.
and that's on mutuality! the relationship is not 50/50 every second of every day... but it is reciprocated and I just loved it okay!!! there's so much here to think about, and what a joy that this book exists in the world, and that I finally got around to reading it, seven years after it first came out!
p.s. isn't it crazy that this book contains lines like:
He loved Chloe. He loved Chloe like a blank canvas and a finished piece and all the exhilarating, painful, stop-and-start moments in between.
and also:
"I want to make you cry. I bet you get like that, don't you? When it's too much. When it feels too good."
and that's on duality!