Concise Critique

On Wednesday this week we discussed "Aurora" and whether or not we can call it a love story. Lucero and Aurora have a complicated, troublesome, unhealthy ... (insert negative adjective) relationship, making it hard to call "Aurora" anything other than an account of two young adults in a peculiar and unfortunate situation. Despite this, Lucero claims that they are in love , which as a reader sounds like bullshit, as Cut would say. Whether Lucero and Aurora are in love or not, they're in a relationship. A relationship where, I believe, Lucero thinks about and needs Aurora more than she thinks about or needs him.  They both physically attack each other, with Lucero doing the most damage between the two. However he seems to be the one who's continually chasing after her, looking for her, looking out for her, and thinking about her. This is not uncommon with relationships involving domestic abuse, and Lucero seems to fit perfectly into the role of a man who fe...

In "How to Be an Other Woman" from  Self-Help , we saw (are took the role of) a woman enter a relationship with a married man, and learned how to deal with being in this situation. In this story, the narrator directs the  you  to go on a number of dates, to be discreet and careful, to refrain from asking too many questions about his wife, and to try to adopt the qualities that the man likes in his wife. The character that is being directed in this story is a young, healthy, somewhat nerdy woman who works in a disappointing job. She seems unsatisfied with her status before the relationship, and once the affair begins, she feels increasingly uncomfortable with her position. "How" features another young, healthy (and maybe a bit nerdy too) young woman who finds herself stuck in a relationship that is increasingly aggravating to her, mostly because she's grown bored of her partner, but also because it never becomes easy to leave him. Here, instead of the male char...