Hello and welcome to Book Wine Club Season 2, a podcast where I, Lauren Popish, pair my latest read with a new wine, and then talk it out with my opinionated and inebriated co hosts, Ryan Consbruck and Julia Popish. 

On today’s episode Ryan, Julia, and I will discuss a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost. in Real Life by Brandon Taylor. This one’s got science, nachos, and an unexpected romance. In this episode, we will discuss the entire book, including our ratings. 

Today we’ll be pairing our read with a glass or three of Margins - Chenin Blanc Skin Fermented 2019. Pour yourself a glass and stay tuned.

Link to book: https://amzn.to/2X0n9aO

Link to wine: https://www.kingstonwine.com/wines/Margins-Chenin-Blanc-Skin-Fermented-2019-w7217480y8

Real Life by Brandon Taylor

Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.  Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.

About the author:

Brandon Taylor is the author of the novel Real Life, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. His work has appeared in Guernica, American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, Buzzfeed Reader, O: The Oprah Magazine, Gay Mag, The New Yorker online, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. He is the senior editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and a staff writer at Lit Hub. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow.  

About the wine:

30 days of skin contact on organically farmed Chenin Blanc Clarksburg. Chenin is one of our favorite grapes, and the skin contact really makes an intense and lovely twist on the noble variety. Grapes are hand harvested, all ambient yeasts for the ferment, no filtering or fining, and all neutral oak vessels. A small sulfite dose for stability is the only thing added.