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Book Review of Sylvia: A Fictional Memoir

Sylvia: A Fictional Memoir
sarah5775 avatar reviewed on + 386 more book reviews


"It would have been easy to leave Sylvia. Had it been difficult, I might have done it."

Sylvia draws us into the lives of a young couple whose struggle to survive Manhattan in the early 1960s involves them in sexual fantasies, paranoia, drugs, and the extreme intimacy of self-destructive violence. Their life together, in many respects a nightmare, also reflects the spiritual qualities of an era and a city at a time when figures such as Malcolm X, Lenny Bruce, and John F. Kennedy came into prominence- an era of flamboyant personalities, social upheaval, assassination, and suicide.

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More like a memoir of what it is like to live with a mentally ill person, with all the chaos. It was very interesting, I read it very quickly and was hooked. Very well written, but I wondered a little what was the point of it all.