BOOK REVIEW: Rules for Saying Goodbye by Katherine Taylor

Reviewed by Helen Redfern

Rules for Saying Goodbye is the debut novel by Katherine Taylor. Many writers' first novels are autobiographical or semi autobiographical. Katherine’s is no exception except she goes further and names her main character after herself.

At the age of twelve Katherine, the book's central character, is sent away by her mother from the town in California, where she lives with her parents and two brothers, to an East Coast boarding school where she discovers boys, the cruelties of teenage girls and pink cocaine. She then drifts from New York to London, back to New York, to Rome, back to New York before finally settling in LA. Most of the story takes place in New York. But Sex and the City this isn’t. To be fair though, I don’t think that was Taylor's intention.

In an interview reported here on Trashionista Katherine the writer has stated that it’s hard “when you’re blonde and attractive and you live in LA and you’ve written a book about a young woman in New York, not to be called ‘chick-lit’”. This is definitely a darker, more satirical book than the more frothy contemporary women’s fiction around and I applaud Katherine the writer for that and for her brave style of writing.

But, in all honesty. I didn’t get it.

Fellow writer Polly Williams in an interview with Trashionista describes Rules for Saying Goodbye as "hilarious". Much of Katherine’s satire and punchy one liners however were lost on me. Where, I suspect, Katherine is being satirical, I just found it depressing. In fact the whole book has a sense of doom. Whether this was because she tended to focus on the more negative things that happened to "her" or she is being dry, making clever observations about life and I am just too stupid to see the humour.

But those things she does mention - the cancer of her best friend, her mother’s depression - we don’t actually get much depth from. Like 9/11 - she makes reference to it, but it is casual - although her hints at the depression that lies over New York in the days, weeks and months that follow are perhaps more real than what has been written about elsewhere.

As for Katherine the character I get to neither like her or know her during the course of the book. I got the sense when researching Katherine the writer that she is determined and feisty but this doesn’t come across. Had it done so, I think I would have actually liked the book.

For me, the book is summed up when Katherine meets a long lost elderly acquaintance and opts not to say hello because she has "nothing interesting to tell her". Quite. So why write a book about this "nothing interesting"?

Rating: 2/5

Like this? Try The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank

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