Any Man: A Novel

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So she encouraged her young daughter to pray that god would handle it and some days later the neighbour’s house was burglarized. We see each man struggling with what has happened to him personally, each with a very different voice--and then the media circus begins, adding its own brand of vicious ugliness to the suffering. The book’s furious empathy is for victims of sexual assault, and especially the way they are futher assaulted and depersonalized by sensationalist news and social media. It's the difference between living your life with actual principles and living your life based on hatred.

maude herself is a mysterious figure, because her individual motivations are less important than the toxic rape culture which plagues survivors.

That you know you're going to get gut punched and deepen that line between your eyes from the intense face you make as you turn each page? The story is about a woman known as Maude who tortures men and boys religiously and the reaction of the males affected and the media. This becomes even more heart-breaking when he has to explain to his young son what happened because of what people have been saying to him in school and how it impacted them as a family unit. I was curious why Amber Tamblyn decided to have Maude’s transgendered victim, Michael Parker, kill himself instead of giving him a voice instead of letting him appear as a viewpoint character.

I am also a huge movie buff and my other interests include listening to music, spending time with my dog Drax, reading, and blogging. There are several scenes--intimate expressions of grief and processing trauma where the words on the page light up like neon signs. This is the story of five men, all of whom have been the victim of an anonymous serial rapist known as Maude. I loved the insightful inner-monologues of the male victims which was somehow both poetic and straight-forward in its rawness. Some of the book’s darkness, she says, is a product of this, borne from a “shadow part” of herself that she experienced for the first time while pregnant.I had mixed feelings about this book, because while I really liked the characters and the way they were written, I also found the writing style at times to be artsy-fartsy and even pretentious. From the minute you find out and you’re puking everywhere, to the thoughts that run through your head about the things you imagine doing if someone harmed your child.