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    Binary Star: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Binary Star: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Binary Star: A Novel
    Audiobook3 hours

    Binary Star: A Novel

    Written by Sarah Gerard

    Narrated by Sarah Gerard

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Binary Star is a powerful and quick-paced story of two young lovers, one a young woman who struggles with anorexia, the other her alcoholic, long-distance boyfriend, as they travel the country trying to find their way.

    The story explores the culture that keeps them both sick or at least continually suggests new quick-fix solutions - diet pills, sleeping pills, magazines that constantly discuss celebrities' weight gains or weight losses, and books that insist there is some secret to diet or a recipe for dreams.

    The language of the stars is the language of the body. Like a star, the anorexic burns fuel that isn't replenished; she is held together by her own gravity.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLantern Audio
    Release dateApr 6, 2015
    ISBN9781942248484
    Unavailable
    Binary Star: A Novel

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    Reviews for Binary Star

    3.5/5

    54 ratings9 reviews

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    • 4/5
      (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)Earlier this year I had an opportunity to interview Sarah Gerard for CCLaP's podcast while she was in town, which unfortunately I didn't get to do because I was so busy with the computer coding bootcamp I was in; and that's a shame, because now that I've finally had a chance to read her novel Binary Star six months later, I've come to realize how good it is, and it makes me realize that we would've had a lot of interesting things to talk about while she was in Chicago. But that said, before anything else, we have to talk about a big caveat right away that may turn you off this book altogether, which is that it's a deep character study of the kind of intolerable hipster couple you meet so often when living in a big city: you know, where he's an alcoholic pill-popper and she has an eating disorder, and they can't really stand each other but they're too morally weak to break up, so instead they just live lives of misery that then bleed all over their exasperated friends on a daily basis, with such a huge sense of middle-class entitlement and white privilege that you may not be able to see around it to the actual story on the other side. (It's telling, I think, that the plot's framework is based around a cross-country trip the couple is taking together, entirely funded by the boyfriend's enabling suburban parents simply for the purpose of the couple "finding themselves," and that they engage in such stereotypical behavior as camping in the woods instead of getting hotel rooms to save money, but then blowing a hundred bucks in an hour at a strip club on a whim. If that's not the very definition of "entitled worthless hipsters who you want to just hit in the fucking face as hard as you can possibly swing your fist," nothing is.)Now me, I don't mind stories about people like these, as long as they're done right like Gerard has done here -- scathing, self-deprecatory, and with a kind of poetry to the prose that almost blends genres, Binary Star has all the insightful self-loathing of a Dostoevsky novel, a heartbreaking portrait of two people simply born without all the abilities needed to succeed in a modern world; but if this isn't your cup of tea, you need to stay far, far away from this book, or else risk the chance of setting this paperback on fire out of sheer frustration about a third of the way through. Not for those who like their prose quick and smooth, this is a halting read that gains much from the slowness Gerard has purposely inserted into the style, the kind of novel that will be loved by those who also love slow-moving European cinema of the 1970s.Out of 10: 8.5, or 9.0 for those with a high tolerance for stories about hipster losers
    • 3/5
      I really found this to be a very confusing novel. I understand the anorexia issue. I suffered from it myself years ago. I found it hard to know whether these two people actually loved each other or were only leaning on each other about their own issues. Also, I had trouble with understanding the stellar part of the text.
    • 2/5
      A first novel by a young novelist and it feels like it. The plot is thin, the characters vague and without motive. Gerard's form allows this: Belief is brittle. My skin is dry and brittle and cracks. I am always bleeding, especially from the fingers. I do not believe that John loves me. There.I believe John used to love me.I do without my body: I am you, I am me, I am you, I am me: I always end with you.Do you remember what happened last night?I don'tThe question is what do I want in my center? The question is What Do I Want? I blow smoke into myself. (70)The writing itself is lovely and I'd probably like it if Gerard's ruling metaphor of stars and orbits and novae wasn't stolen from a stronger, earlier novel about a young woman with anorexia: Jenefer Shute's Life-Size (1992). When you (or your agent) pitch your book to publishers, one of the things they ask you to do is prove why your book is different from other books on the same topic, so Gerard or her agent had to know about Life-Size, one of the most noted novels about eating disorders. Yet, Gerard went on, plagiarizing Shute merrily, in her novel that has a fraction of the depth, complexity, and power of Life-Size. She doesn't even note Shute or Life-Size in the acknowledgements. This is like writing a novel about an adorable London urchin who gets caught up in a gang of street thieves led by Gagin and not crediting Dickens. Gerard's fragmented, elusive form allows her characters to move throughout her story without motivation, background, context. We have no idea why the narrator feels the way she does; she is simply presented to us as Anorexia itself. The same for John, the only other character, who is the Alcoholic, Drug Addict, Impulsive, Bad Boyfriend. The escalation of their behaviors at the novel's end has no explanation beyond those capitalized words and their stereotypes.So, lovely writing; plagiarized, thin, motiveless content. If you're writing a dissertation on this kind of literature, I'd recommend it; otherwise, keep browsing, this book isn't worth your time.
    • 5/5
      could not put down. will probably pick back up and read again and maybe be able to better put into words how i feel about this one.
    • 3/5
      This was an ok book... just ok. The language felt choppy and broken, almost like neurotic diary entries. One of the questions it raised for me was how is our society influencing and affecting our way of living and the choices we make, especially as adolescent girls. The nod to fast-food, diet pills, celebrity magazines, and liquor stores really made me feel for the girl that struggled with an eating disorder and a skewed perception of herself and the world around her.
    • 5/5
      Binary Star burns very hot, very bright. I thought it to be a brilliant, brilliant novel.It is gruesome, dense with self-harm and violence and fear. And yet there is still love, still hope.Our protagonist is a girl with anorexia, bulimia, and an alcoholic boyfriend. They love themselves and they love each other and yet they hate themselves and they hate each other.This is basically their relationship:"I want you to want to touch me. I want you to worry about me. I want your attention. I want you to fill me. I'm empty. I make you do it. I make you bad. I want you to empty me. Make me feel like nothing. Tell me I'm nothing. I feel nothing."It's fucked up, isn't it?They're so abusive toward themselves, abuse from the other feels like love and love from the other feels like abuse. They're sick. It's sick. The protagonist knows it's sick and Gerard knows it's sick but she writes it like it's not sick so the protagonist can convince herself it's not sick and that's even sicker but it's fascinating and I can't stop reading.The only thing I didn't love was the veganarchism arc. There was already so much going on, I couldn't stomach it.Lastly, see how each word is ironically heavy? See how the prose is short and shorter and short? It made my heart race, it made me go faster and faster, it made me feel deranged, unhinged, just like the protagonist. It made me feel like I'm reeling. I'm reeling.Binary Star shines.
    • 4/5
      Really enjoyed this. Veerry stream of consciousness, but much more successful at it than Coyote, by Colin Winnette, which I had finished right before starting Binary Star. It was much easier, here, to tell who was speaking, and to tell what was going on inside the protagonist's head. The plot was easier to follow. The writing was poetic, almost one long free-verse poem.

      All of that said, the plot is that of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, swapping in anorexia for schizophrenia and astronomy for Zen Buddhism, but with a less satisfying conclusion. But I will probably read it again, more slowly and closely. I'm sure there's a great deal I missed.
    • 4/5
      First: In 2015, this book has hit the shelves (or, I suspect, mainly the internet booksellers) during the trigger warning debates. I've been following this one from the sidelines, but I don't feel like I'm currently in a position to contribute anything meaningful (re: academia); with this book, I'm making an exception: if you have an active eating disorder or are in recovery, know thyself.What particularly fascinated me about Gerard's book (and, I hope, would keep it from getting hastily labeled as a "misery memoir" loosely coded as fiction) is the efficiency of form. Abbreviated sections, almost reminiscent of flash fiction if they were to stand alone, perfectly capture a protagonist who is both shrinking and shattering. She has flashes of clarity and truly luminous thought (Gerard uses ongoing astronomy imagery and metaphors to convey these; make no mistake that these are extremely complex and not at all trite reflections about twinkly stars and moonbeams). Jumbled up in these moments of beauty are the vile and the mundane: each brief passage stands alone as a piece of a narrator who is herself losing all internal and external cohesion/coherence. I did not expect a "traditional," tidy ending, but I did end up somewhat confounded. What transpired did bear on some themes in the novel, but, ultimately, it seemed too distant from what I would have identified as the core issues. Because it strayed from the narrator's overall concerns (what she voices most in the majority of the novel), it read less like a twist or surprise end than a confusing one.Overall, this was an excellent debut, and I hope there's more to come.
    • 3/5
      This book kind of made me feel sick. That's not necessarily a bad thing. I just had a very visceral experience with the characters. Reading the story felt like riding the teacups at Disneyland. It's all very dizzying. What's interesting is that the main character has created such an illusion of control, but she is clearly spinning, spinning, spinning. Part of me still wonders what became of the characters. I wanted more of a resolution. Still, it was a good read. An interesting read. Very poetic.