Devourer of Books

Rules for Saying Goodbye by Katherine Taylor

Have you ever wondered what “Sex and the City” would be like if Carrie Bradshaw didn’t have her girlfriends, was excruciatingly bad at romantic relationships, and hadn’t ‘made it’ as a writer? If so, you may be interested in “Rules for Saying Goodbye”.

Katherine Taylor was sent by her mother to boarding school ‘back East’ in order to escape Fresno, California. There she develops a love for New York City, where she moves as an adult. Katherine’s life consists mostly of bartending while not really trying to make it as a writer and occasionally dating men who are spectacularly wrong for her. Katherine moves to London with one of these men and to Rome for another to whom she gets engaged. Her relationships don’t go very well because she picks men with whom she has nothing in common and, to be honest, she’s a little crazy.

I honestly found the character fairly obnoxious. She was one of those people with whom I find it very difficult to empathize, primarily because she more or less refused to grow up. Towards the end of the book, I began to have the sneaking suspicion that “Rules for Saying Goodbye” is at least partly autobiographical. The first clue to that possibility was that the protagonist main character had the exact same name as the author. More than that, though, was the fact that I wasn’t at all sure why the book was written. It seemed more ‘here is this life,’ without much focus and there was no real conclusion. The character Katherine Taylor is an aspiring writer and, near the end of the book, is near desperate to write a first novel. It seemed that perhaps she may have just decided to write her life and embellish it a bit to make everything seem more glamorous – writing a ‘memoir’ in the same sense that James Frey did, except having enough sense not to call it a memoir.

All this to say that I wasn’t a huge fan of the novel. However, if you are into chick lit, you might enjoy it, particularly as a beach read.

If you are so inclined, buy this book on Amazon.

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