A review by jaina8851
The First Ten Years: Two Sides of the Same Love Story by Joseph Fink

reflective slow-paced

2.25

This really didn't land for me. I probably should have DNFed it. I thought it was a really cool concept and the first hour or so was quirky and funny, but it got tiresome for me pretty quickly. It turns out this book is exactly what it says on the tin: two people musing about their own relationship over the course of ten entire years, and it's... kind of mundane and boring to read about another couple's life. It's possible that if I had ever been a listener of Nightvale, I might have been more invested in this. A lot of the stuff related to the first Trump regime also didn't age well, particularly reading this now in the first weeks of his second regime. It felt like an inordinate chunk of the book was taken up talking about him in a book that was supposed to be about their life and love story. Other than talking about how much they cried about it, neither of them really went into detail about how they personally were impacted by his policies, so it just felt oddly performative. The fact that they kind of smugly say at the end "at the time of this writing, neither of us have gotten our acts together to start therapy" after detailing their respective mental breakdowns really sealed the deal on this being a bit of a self-indulgent yikes.