Charles Macaulay - Blog Posts
jessica pratt's music and gordon's gardenparty by the cardigans radiate such camilla macaulay energy for me
Everyday I stumble on beautiful parts of this book which makes me fall in love with it even more.. i found this passage really sad..
TSH hot takes 🔥
-Julian was actually a dick. He isolated and groomed vulnerable students (do you think it's a coincidence that every single member of the greek class had a difficult home life?) into thinking that these very outdated concepts of love and power were good for them. He compared their dangerous behaviour to that of ancient gods. Then, rather than face the consequence of his actions and take accountability, he left when it mattered.
-Charles was an asshole, but he's not a scapegoat. You cannot blame all the problems on Charles, he was an addict as a result of his trauma. He needed help. This doesn't excuse him from his actions, but it explains them. At the beginning of the book he physically could not bring himself to hurt Camilla. He's not a "bad" person. He's a sick person.
-Bunny didn't deserve to die, but he was also probably going to condemn the group at some point. He didn't just die for no reason. (Believing that Bunny's death was truly pointless also means believing that Henry was an actual psychopath who killed his friend for shits and giggles.)
-Judy, Cloke and Sophie ended up the happiest. That is literally the moral of the book. Judy wasn't all tortured when Richard didn't want to hang out with her, she shook it off and kept living her life. That's literally the point.
-Richard was never in love with Camilla. He loved the idea of her, but didn't see her as a person. Because of this specific dynamic and the fact the Richard is narrating, we know nothing about her actual personality. Anything he says can be disputed, and a lot of it contradicts itself.
-Francis is not blameless or unproblematic, but of the group he probably had the best intentions. Most of his behaviour that can be interpreted as creepy can be chalked up to Richard's internalized homophobia (remember, everything is told from his point of view, and Francis was a gay man in the 80's) When you look objectively at what Francis did, you see that he made a pass, got rejected, then dropped it and moved on. There is (i think) one more attempt made later on in the book, and that is furthered by Richard and only interrupted when Charles shows up.
-Henry may be the metaphorical representative of death when talking about the book, but in the narrative it's important to remember he's also just a person. Otherwise everything he does seems beyond question, and he's assigned this label as just "evil." He was 21!! Literally still a kid
-There were not good or bad characters. The reason they hit so hard is because each of them are so layered. They all have good traits and bad traits, but calling one "evil" takes away their humanity and dismisses their complexity that makes them so great.
"i bet you figured i'd pass with the winter, be something easy to forget, but im in the trees, im in the breeze, my footsteps on the ground. you'll see my face in every place but you can't catch me know" but from bunnys pov SCREAMINGGGG
the way bunny found out about everything will forever break my heart, y'all hate on him too much. he didn't deserve any of it despite of his faults
i finished the secret history i will forever think of it
if i had a nickle every time my favorite book characters had the same last name, i would have two nickles. which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice. yes i'm looking at you haymitch and francis abernathy
i relate to bunny corcoran in a "making up a whole concept and linking it to my topic just to hit the word count in a seminar paper for uni because im a pathological procrastinator and did not start writing it up until it was too late" way
it’s winter, time to reread tsh
in my mind francis is fashion obsessed