Disclaimer: Carrie Carolyn Coco is not a novel. It’s a piece of investigative journalism in the true-crime genre. All quotes in the post below are from interviews Gerard conducted with actual people.
Sarah Gerard’s search for an alternative explanation of Carolyn Bush’s murder was unsuccessful. However, in the process of investigating her acquaintance’s death, she conducted many interviews with people in Bush’s circle of friends. These are self-identified “far-left Socialists” who talk like a parody of a clueless wokester but do it in complete seriousness. One, for example, introduces herself as “a poet and performance artist, an ethnobotanic literary critic.” Yes, that’s all one person. If you are curious what an ethnobotanic literary critic is, apparently it’s somebody who says things like the following:
“It was an early draft of trying to pull together my understanding of Blackness and femininity, and the parallels with plant life, and how that resource is not valued.”
She was working as a flower courier then, “bringing the dying carcasses of floral material from human to human in acts of celebration.” Humans raise these beings only to kill them. She felt compelled to write about that, and about “that trans-moment of turning myself into an extremely delicate version of myself in order to rage, fully grieve.”
I swear to God this is not a parody. These people really are like that.
Carolyn’s friends mourn her death by engaging in narcissistic displays of their extreme woundedness and exhibitionist analyses of every shade of their flamboyant emotions regarding her death. They believe that every emotion deserves to be exhaustively and repetitively verbalized and assign earth-shattering importance to their constantly shifting moods.
Gerard shares the political views of the people she writes about and routinely regales readers with such pearls of lefty wisdom as
Racism is woven into the fabric of our culture
and
Our culture, for some reason that I still can’t explain, seems to hate anyone who isn’t a man
and
There’s a lot of misogyny in Southern culture
and
I think it’s something about our culture.
Yes, Gerard really likes the word “culture.”
Gerard wanted to preserve the memory of Carolyn by telling about her life and the art she created. But she did the dead woman no favors because Bush’s art consisted of her producing the following kind of writing:
It was like parataxis, and the chance operation of parataxis, the accumulative algebra of parataxis, its absolute certainty, which is felt precisely as a continuity of emptiness.
In case you don’t get art, this is supposed to be “an extended prose poem blending memoir and criticism.” Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Philistine!
Gerard is not lacking in talent and, thankfully, her own text is not filled with “the accumulative algebra of parataxis.” She’s good at making her characters come alive on the page and show us vividly how they conduct their squalid woke lives dedicated to the following kind of projects:
Let’s sustain our practice and come together to create a space where we work, create, discuss, read, or write. One that is ours for collaboration, action, or exegesis.
It is impossible not to feel pity for these confused young people who come from wealthy yet broken homes and who lead lives of such extraordinary narcissism that any possibility of a normal human contact among them is out of the question. They take copious amounts of drugs, practice witchcraft, busily swap “partners” (which is their word of choice for sexual partners), talk up a storm about how they are victimized by the racist-sexist culture, and treat each other like absolute garbage. Some of them will come to their senses before it becomes too late, find normal jobs, get married, and move to the suburbs. Those they leave behind will become more and more eccentric and will be ever understand why their former comrades keep betraying them.
I highly recommend the book because it’s important to know this subculture, and Gerard writes so well that the book goes down a treat. It’s very depressing in spite of the funny bits about ethnobotanic whatevers and parataxical parataxis but people like theS are about to put a president into the White House and it’s useful to understand how they think.
Clarissa's Blog 
I don’t know if this is supposed to be a parody of wokeness or the real deal, the victim and her friends sound deranged. And that lifestyle of sex, drinking, drugs and so-called witchcraft sounds horrific, even before I became a Catholic such a lifestyle would have disgusted me.
It actually reminds me of the grownup version of Lost Children of Rockdale County, a documentary about a syphilis outbreak in an affluent Atlanta suburb: https://youtu.be/Gz7qh_Luvjw?si=-TVoXUfgnK2RwgmI
The syphilis outbreak exposed how many of these rich kids were partying and engaging in all sorts of strange sexual activities because the parents were negligent and spoiled them.
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I feel deeply sorry for the people Gerard describes in her book. They are young, intelligent. They could be doing something with their lives. Instead they are floundering in this morass of hallucinogens, meaningless sex, doomed efforts to make it as an artist, and endless mutual accusations of racism-sexism.
I don’t know what flaw in the parenting strategies or the overall societal environment produces this glitch but it’s sad to watch.
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Thank you for this wonderful review, and the previous one, it makes me want to go and read the book just to take the p**s out of it, but there are limits to my tolerance of Wokery and Woko talk.
Still, you’re right, one must read these writers in order to understand these people.
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Another quote from the book: “Risky behavior and dangerous masculinity are not being discouraged by your college’s administration.”
I can just about imagine how a college administration would discourage dangerous masculinity.
This is pure comedic gold, my friend. 10 years ago it would be published as a parody and everybody would say it’s too out there to be realistic. Today, it’s already a reality.
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There are so many delightful quotes I have annotated from this book that I wish there were space to post them all.
Gerard also writes fiction, and I’m now very curious to see what it is like.
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“Gerard also writes fiction”
Okay……. I, for some dumb reason, kind of thought/assumed that she had ficitonalized her book… the idea that these are interviews with real people…. I dunno… I just….. yikes…. I’m…. speechless…
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No, no, this is non-fiction. These are real, actual people. It would be much less funny otherwise. I’ll amend the OP to make it clear.
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“Humans raise these beings only to kill them..”
Does she really think it kills the plant to cut off the flower?
(gardener dying a little inside)
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I have a strong suspicion that the ethnobotanist in question doesn’t spend much time around actual plants.
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I’ve read a tremendous amount of psychedelic literature, and do get the feeling “ethnobotanist” is a bid for respectability from the psychonaut crowd. I’ve read a little too much on them to grant it.
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I’m so innocent that I never heard of psychonauts either.
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You’re not missing much.
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…OTOH, if you want to know where the whole Silicon Valley gnosticism of let’s-all-become-pure-electronic-minds-in-a-digitized-reality and build our own autonomous electric gods thing comes from… it helps to know something about the whole LSD/psilocybin/peyote scene back in the 50s and onward, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, Carlos Castaneda, etc. The mainstreaming of LSD and the birth of silicon valley tech culture are all wrapped up in each other in super creepy ways.
Michael Pollan is blind to the implications of what he writes about, but he lays out the connections and personalities involved pretty clearly in his book *How to Change Your Mind*, which is fascinating if you just skim through the parts where he’s talking about his own psychedelic experimentation, and read the parts where he’s being an actual journalist.
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\ Some of them will come to their senses before it becomes too late, find normal jobs, get married, and move to the suburbs.
Are all / most American towns and cities truly unsuited for normal life? Is it because of poor areas with African-Americans, immigrants from certain countries, and so on? I read about “white flight”, but surely it hasn’t happened in every American town and city?
Both in Ukraine and in Israel, larger towns / cities are a good place to live in, unlike periphery areas. I live in one of the largest Israeli cities near Tel Aviv. That’s where jobs, hi-tech firms, cultural events are.
\ The syphilis outbreak exposed how many of these rich kids were partying and engaging in all sorts of strange sexual activities because the parents were negligent and spoiled them.
I watched this documentary yesterday. One of the things that stood out is how boring and sterile the kids’ environment is. I would’ve suffered growing up like this:
[59:58] in many ways, Rockdale is still the same place. There is still no mall, only one movie theater, and the kids say nothing much to do on a Saturday night. The bowling alley is one of the few places for teenagers to gather.
When they are kicked out by police, they, quoting a 14-year-old girl, “can get on the streets, do whatever we want.”
Living at the center of a large city, I can walk every evening on a central street with cafes, look at people, buy food at numerous supermarkets and rest after a long day of work. Just looking at all this variety is stimulating and calming.
Those kids cannot go anywhere w/o a car, which increases peer pressure imo. W/o a friend with a car, one can only stay home. The area they live in must be dark after sun goes down, and one cannot walk anywhere. One identical house after another with grass between them, nothing to look at at all.
Again, this is not against private houses or being happy living in a suburb. 🙂
I simply am confused by the idea that suburbs are ideal for raising kids for a majority of people.
Clarissa, you grew up in a larger city, right? Wouldn’t you have been bored by the environment of a typical American suburb as a teen / young person? Today as an adult with a stimulating job and rich inner life, it surely feels different for you, but for most teens?
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Before kids reach teenage years, there’s quite a lot of preceding years. 🙂 Air quality, quiet, availability of parks, playgrounds, cheap kids’ activities – that’s all crucial. A backyard, a front yard, not having to drag a stroller into an elevator or up the stairs.
With a child under the age of 10, sleep is one of the main concerns. You need it to be quiet. Klara falls asleep at 7:30. I need no traffic, no sirens, no people outside.
I also need the grocery store to be close, a doctor to be available within an hour, everything to be at a 10-minute drive at most.
I used to love large cities and city life passionately but it changed completely for me after having a child. My sister lives in a big city and it’s the same lifestyle as mine in the suburbs but with much longer drives and much more expensive kid activities. They don’t live in the city center, of course.
Not all North American cities are bad, I’m sure, but suburbs are just so much better.
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