JUST BY LOOKING AT HIM, clever, amusing, witty even! But...

JUST BY LOOKING AT HIM
RYAN O'CONNELL
Atria Books
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Read this interview with Author O'Connell on LitHub!

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From the star of Peacock’s Queer as Folk and the Netflix series Special comes a darkly witty and touching novel following a gay TV writer with cerebral palsy as he fights addiction and searches for acceptance in an overwhelmingly ableist world.

Elliott appears to be living the dream as a successful TV writer with a doting boyfriend. But behind his Instagram filter of a life, he’s grappling with an intensifying alcohol addiction, he can’t seem to stop cheating on his boyfriend with various sex workers, and his cerebral palsy is making him feel like gay Shrek.

After falling down a rabbit hole of sex, drinking, and Hollywood backstabbing, Elliott decides to limp his way towards redemption. But facing your demons is easier said than done.

Candid, biting, and refreshingly real, Just by Looking at Him is an incisive commentary on gay life, a heart-centered, laugh-out-loud exploration of self, and a rare insight into life as a person with disabilities.

I RECEIVED THIS DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: No one, looking from the outside in, will ever know what others are enduring, surviving, overcoming...or hiding. The author's got a track record of blowing the doors off handy hiding places...go watch his first show, Special, if you're in any doubt...and he's brought his unsparing honesty to bear on fiction about the supremely ableist gay-male world. Being a gay male, that's what he knows, so that's perfectly fair. It's a solid, explanatory fact that the author, writer for and star in the Peacock revival of Queer as Folk as well as the creator of the Netflix series Special based on his differently-abled-gay-guy memoir I'm Special and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves, is also the partner of Jonathan Parks-Ramage of Yes, Daddy fame.

This, then, is a Personage within QUILTBAG creativeland. I expected that I would be treated to outstanding stories told in superbly structured chapters.

I didn't get that.

I did get the expected honest and unflinching, no-bullshit presentation of Elliott's struggles with what I'd call impostor syndrome, fear of rejection, and a huge self-confidence deficit stemming from being gay and having cerebral palsy. I got hefty doses of snark and sarcasm; I got unblinking acknowledgment of the harm divergent career paths and the temptations of sudden financial freedom present in a couple's life. I got the eternal, and unwinnable, struggle of people to be monogamous when there is a vast smorgasbord of yummy side dishes available in any number of technologically assisted ways.

It was a lot of fun to read the author's one-liners, eg: "Lately I’d been feeling more and more that monogamy, like capitalism or keto, wasn’t sustainable, but I couldn’t be sure Gus was on the same page." It was not quite as much fun to have the funny one-liners be the book. It's like reading a really hilarious Twitter thread. (Seriously...seventy-four chapters is way, way too many for three hundred-ish pages.) After a while, enough with this...I'm working harder than I think I should have to to get the laffs. It's the comedy set that goes on too long, the Saturday Night Live skit that refuses to end.

It's also the man's first novel, these are common problems with comedic first novels, and there's not one thing in here that I didn't think belonged; it's just that it belonged in a slightly different structure. There's a great deal of sexual material and a great deal of discussion, in what I found slightly cringe-worthy (ie, dismissively dealt with via humor) terms, of substance abuse. It really highlights a very significant issue I felt as I got deeper and deeper into Elliott's story: He's really blind to his white cismale privilege. He's disabled, and an addict; but he deals with those problems from a very, very high platform that puts him in reach of all kinds of support and help.

Lamenting the innocence of 2012 wasn't a great idea, either, Author O'Connell. Things were easier? For men like us, maybe, but things are only getting better too slowly for others not white, not male, and not well off. We're still MILES ahead in this miserable race called "being American." Using self-deprecating humor to deflect negative awareness of one's privilege isn't a viable strategy in this day and age. (Maybe that's what the author meant about 2012 being easier?)

On balance, then, while I laughed and even found a lot of the self-reflection (primarily done at the end of the book) moving, I was too aware of some problems with the way this book was conceived and executed that, quite honestly, I didn't expect to see in 2022's publishing environment.