This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here.

This was initially a companion series to the magnificent Jenny Trout‘s review of the original novel, ‘Beautiful Disaster’. Jenny has since stopped her review, not wanting to give McGuire any further publicity in the wake of her attempts to run for office.

 

Content warnings: Stalkery controlling behaviour (the narrative). Gratuitous use of the word ‘fuck’ (me).

 

Chapter Twenty-Four: Possession

Is it just me or does that title not bode well?

We’ve timejumped forward; this chapter starts with Travis going round and round in his head over what turns out to be a decision on whether to go to the Valentine’s Day party (pros: Abby will be there, cons: he’ll potentially have to watch her dancing with someone else/meeting her future husband). Shep and America are back together, though it took them five weeks after the break-up at the end of the previous chapter, and have been busy with makeup sex.

America never missed a moment to let me know she hated my guts

Well, at least she got there eventually, though it would have been a lot more constructive if she could have worked that out back when she was urging Abby to get together with him.

And, wait a moment here, sounds like we skipped over another event:

I had talked Abby into leaving her date with Parker to come with me to a fight. Of course I wanted her there, but I made the mistake of admitting it was also that I had primarily asked her so I could win a pissing contest. I wanted Parker to know he had no hold on her. Abby felt I’d taken advantage of her feelings for me, and she was right.

So it sounds like we had another whole scene in ‘Beautiful’ which has just been skipped over and retrospectively summarised in ‘Walking’. On the one hand, not even bothering to write important scenes in your own book is really shoddy writing, but on the other hand it’s a fair guess that if McGuire had written the scene then that would have been substantially more shoddy writing for me to wade through. I’ll take it as a win.

All of those things were enough to feel guilty about, but the fact that Abby had been attacked in a place where I’d taken her made it nearly impossible to look anyone in the eye. Adding to all of that our close call with the law totaled up to me being a gigantic fuckup.

….okaaay, what? Just how much did McGuire leave out here? I’m going to have to go and at least skim through this scene in ‘Beautiful’.

OK. Back. I’m going to have a shot at summarising the left-out parts of ‘Beautiful’ as I read through them, so, braced for WTFery:

• The weekend before Valentine’s Day, Abby and America are dancing at the Red and keep feeling men dancing behind them who then disappear, which turns out to be because Trav and Shep are dragging away any men who try dancing with them. Which they’re apparently accomplishing without starting any fights or any yells of ‘WTF do you think you’re doing?’, since all Abby’s aware of each time is that someone is dancing up against her just behind her and then he isn’t. This is, apparently, something the boys don’t see any problem at all with doing; when Abby finally notices what’s happening and confronts them, the boys are described as ‘smiling’ and ‘proud’ of what they’re doing. America doesn’t notice what’s going on, so she and Shep get back together at this point.
• Abby then accepts an offer from Parker to go out for pizza and a film together as ‘just friends’, having apparently forgotten how he was previously spreading rumours and slut-shaming her when she was with Travis, which does not sound like a great basis for friendship.
• Travis and Shep then turn up at the pizza place, to Parker’s alarm. The waitress spends ages hanging hopefully round their table and getting ignored, because we haven’t been reminded in a while of how irresistible Trav is to women and how inferior all other women are to Abby.
• Travis gets a call and gets up to head out to a fight. Good job he hadn’t ordered his food yet, or he’d have had to leave it. It really makes no sense that Adam gives him so little warning (we’re told it’s 45 minutes, in which Travis has to include journey time). He stops by Abby’s table and says he wants Abby there, and then changes this to saying he needs her there, implying that he’s worried because the other guy has been training.
• Abby apparently makes up her mind to go with him ‘the second he asks’, and, when Parker protests, she tells him that she’s going because Travis is her ‘best friend’. So, never mind America, who has been her best friend whom she’s known lifelong; apparently the ex-boyfriend she hasn’t spoken to for almost three months except for a couple of arguments is now her best friend. (BTW, I would feel sorry for Parker right now, but as per above he’s a dick as well so I don’t.)
• Abby leaves with Travis and holds hands with him on the way out and in the taxi, because that’s not really giving mixed messages at all.
• They get to the place where the fight is being held and it’s dangerously crowded. Adam (the guy who arranges the fights) wants to be sure Travis is going to fight properly as there’s so much money on this, but Travis is being a cocky little shit about the whole thing as usual. So much for him being worried, I guess.
• The fight starts and it’s pretty vicious, and not going all Travis’s way. Abby turns aside for a moment and, as it’s so crowded, she gets shuffled off to the side away from Shepley and against a wall, where Ethan (the guy who tried to chat her up several chapters ago and who Travis implied had a history of sexual assault) starts trying to chat her up again and grabs her and mauls her when she tries to get away.
• Travis sees what’s going on and tries to get to her to help, but one of the others keeps shoving him back into the ring to fight. Abby gets Ethan off her temporarily by kneeing him in the groin, and Shep manages to get to Abby and gets her out.
• Travis runs out to find her, sees the guy who kept pushing him back into the ring, and beats him up. Then Shep yells to alert him that Ethan’s going past (yeah, well done, Shep, clearly what this situation needs right now is even more violence/s) and Trav beats him up as well. Oh, and this included ramming Ethan’s face into his car headlight, shattering the headlight.
• Police arrive and block the exit. The gruesome foursome get out of there PDQ and Shep manages to find another exit and drive them back to the apartment.
• Travis lifts Abby out of the back seat and carries her into the apartment, funnily enough without her feeling any apparent need to point out that WTF, she isn’t a swooning Victorian maiden and can actually walk here. Toto’s all excited to see her but Trav shifts him out of the room (gently, at least).
• Trav is really upset and apologetic about what happened to Abby. He tells her to stay over as the residential hall is ‘crawling with cops’ (why? It’s not where the fight was).
• Trav promptly goes to take a shower and all four of them drink quite a bit of alcohol, because some things apparently never change.
• Abby’s sympathetic with Trav until he confesses to her that he only tried to get her to the game to prove a point to Parker. After that, she’s PO’d. She throws a glass at him, throws him out of the room (she’s sleeping on the bed, he’s going to sleep on the sofa), and cries her eyes out, with America coming in to hold her.
• Abby and America go back to the dorm the next morning. Abby miserably reflects on how shitty the whole situation is.

Following which, we see Abby with Finch at the party, so that seems to be us caught up. Well, that was a wild ride. (counts back) Almost two chapters worth of significant stuff just left out and summarised in a couple of paragraphs, so, way to avoid writing your own fricking book, McGuire. But, again, at least it did make it somewhat quicker for me to get through, so at least for once I’m benefiting from McGuire’s crappy writing skill.

Anyway… back to ‘Walking’. Shep is about to head off with America, and Trav apologises to him again for screwing up. Trav drinks ‘the last of the whiskey’, considers going out to get more, and has a rare moment of self-honesty in realising that no amount of whiskey is actually going to help him decide whether to go to the frat party or not. So… he goes to get more whiskey on his way to the frat party anyway, and drinks a half-pint of that before going in because he’s ‘finding courage in the bottom of a bottle’. Thank you once again, McGuire, for this excellent role-modelling for the youth of today.

Travis looks for Abby and eventually finds her dancing with Finch. In case it isn’t clear, Finch is The Gay Best Friend and Travis appears to be fully aware of that, so hopefully no tragic misunderstandings here. Trav walks over to them and asks Finch if he can cut in. Neither boy seems interested in asking Abby whether this is OK, despite Finch being well aware of the situation. Great.

Abby, for unclear reasons, does go along with dancing with Trav, though apparently resists his attempts to pull her closer. Trav tells her she looks beautiful and that he didn’t really mean what he’d said before about asking her to the fight to prove a point to Parker. Excuse me, McGuire, but just a few pages back Trav was describing himself as having ‘admitted’ this to Abby, so that certainly sounds like it was actually true. So I guess he’s now lying to her. Maybe this is one of the bits for which McGuire’s reason for omitting it from this book was because she was trying to gloss over just how bad Travis sounded in it.

Abby says that she wishes she did hate him because it would make everything a lot easier, which is true enough.

A cautious, small smile spread across my lips. “So what pisses you off more? What I did to make you wanna hate me? Or knowing that you can’t?”

This further attempt at point-scoring is enough for Abby, who turns and legs it out of there.

Trying to speak to her at all seemed futile, now. Every interaction just added to the growing snowball of clusterfucks that was our relationship.

Well, sounds like you should learn something from that…

I walked up the stairs and made a beeline for the keg,

…yeah, that wasn’t actually the lesson I had in mind.

cursing my greediness and the empty bottle of whiskey lying somewhere in Sig Tau’s front lawn.

So he’s a litterbug as well? I mean, not that I’m even surprised by this point…

Trav spends the next hour drinking beer. I’m going to guess that this won’t have any apparent physical effect on him. He then looks over to try to catch Abby’s eye and instead sees that she and Finch are just getting ready to leave. Just as Abby’s walking out, the song that she and Travis danced to at her birthday party comes on. I assumed this was going to be one of those soppy romance ‘fall back into each other’s arms thinking about the memories, all is magically forgiven’ moments, but I had, as so often, managed to utterly underestimate Maguire’s awfulness level, because here’s what actually happens:

One of the frat boys asks her to dance and without thinking about it Trav darts over to her and also asks her to dance. (Well, at least that was a relief; I thought Trav was going to punch him.) Abby refuses, gets narky, and dances with the first guy instead. (Huh. Another relief.) Apparently this is as much functional stuff as Maguire can sustain, however, because…

Trav then jumps on a chair, shouts out a semi-coherent toast to ‘douche bags’ and ‘girls that break your heart’, and, despite Shep trying to stop him, pushes his way over to where Abby’s dancing with the other boy (Brad), says he’s cutting in, and threatens Brad with having his throat ripped out if he doesn’t back off and go along with this. Okaaaaay, so apparently we’re back in scary stalker territory. Abby tells Trav that the way she feels about him ‘very closely resembles hate’ and refuses to dance. Good for her. She goes and grabs someone else to dance with. Another guy dances up behind her and starts grinding into her, and Trav decides he needs to rescue her, so he grabs her and throws her over his shoulder ready to drag her off back to his cave apartment like one of those bad stereotypes from the Neolithic.

Trav carries Abby upstairs (past America, who flat-out laughs at her when she calls out for help, so fuck you, America, so much for the protective friend), and outside, where the designated driver is handily waiting at the wheel of his car. Wait, is he a hired chauffeur or something? Wouldn’t he be inside at the party? Travis threatens Donnie into driving both of them back to Trav’s apartment, then physically restrains Abby when she tries to get out of the car. Yes, this is a thing that the love interest is fucking well doing in this fucking book which we all fucking know is going to fucking end with this fuckbag fucking getting back together with her and with that fucking well being presented as a happy fucking ending.

Abby bites Trav in an unsuccessful attempt to get away, to which he tells her ‘”Do your worst, Pidge, I’m tired of your shit.”‘

“My shit? Let me out of this fucking car!”

I pulled her wrists close to my face. “I love you, dammit! We’re not going anywhere until you sober up and we figure this out!”

Jesus H. Freaking Christ, Travis, she has broken up with you and you are fucking assaulting and restraining her and the only thing you need to figure out right now is how to stop being one of the later chapters in a book analysing the typical sequence of ways that abusive partners escalate their behaviour until it reaches murder. Fuck you with a cactus.

Abby, having apparently realised that she has no chance of successfully fighting back physically against Trav and that her best bet is to at least not make him angrier, stops trying to fight and waits it out till they get to the apartment. When they get there, she tries asking Donnie to take her home, but Trav drags her out, slings her over his shoulder again, and marches upstairs with her.

Abby tries telling him she’s going to call his dad and Travis laughs and tells her her dad would pat him on the back for this. Classic abuser behaviour of making the abused person feel everyone’s on the abuser’s side. He drags her struggling into the apartment and throws her down on the bed to ‘sleep it off’, and when she tries yelling at him that she doesn’t ‘belong to’ him any more, he gets all up in her face and screams back that he belongs to her.

And, to everyone else thinking ‘Fuck, this is going to be presented as a successful way of winning her over, isn’t it?’  …yes. Sadly, you were right.

Abby reached out, but instead of slapping my face, she grabbed each of my cheeks and slammed her mouth into mine.

…and they rip each other’s clothes off and she drags him on top of her. Of course.

By the way, if you want to know how foolishly optimistic I can be, I actually did hold out hopes that maybe this would be another time where she’d tell him to get stuffed and maybe it would be another chapter before they got back together and so at least the book would only show them getting together in spite of Travis’s behaviour, not because of it. But, no. Maguire has to show Travis being the kind of controlling stalkery ex who’s one step away from getting zip ties and show that as being what induces Abby to get back with him. Fuck. This. Shit. With. A. Fucking. Cactus.

Trav does then hold off for a minute on having sex because he realises Abby’s drunk, and does say that he’s ‘been an ass’ and that he ‘never wanted Abby to wonder if he’d taken advantage of this moment’, and so I dared to hope maybe we’d get a sliver of decent appropriate behaviour showing through the rest of this shitshow, but, nope; what he actually does at this point is tell her to say that she belongs to him and she’ll take him back. So, no, Travis is actually not trying at all to make sure that he’s not taking advantage of the drunk woman he just fucking dragged back to his apartment; he’s trying to take even more advantage of her to make sure that she promises to stay with him.

And, yes, of course, Abby promises him that she’s his and she’s going to stay with him and love him forever… because that’s such a wonderful idea to promise to the teenager who not only has enough red flags to open a flag store but whom you have only known for a few months. This isn’t romance or love, this is limerence hitting your dopamine centres.

Anyway, there are still almost four pages left in this senseforesaken chapter but I can sum them up fairly quickly: Trav wakes up convinced that Abby’s going to be angry with him for last night and leave him again, Abby doesn’t have the sense to do any such thing and convinces him she wants to stay, it turns out Abby’s desperately wanted to get back with him since Thanksgiving but thought he didn’t want her, blah-de-blah, apparently everything’s sunshine and roses now, chapter ends.

Oooookaaaaay. Since all I seem to be doing with this clusterfuck of a chapter is swearing non-stop, I figure it’s worth putting in at least a bit of thought as to why people think this sort of stuff is so amazingly romantic.

To recap: We have a man who threatens other people with violence, drags his ex out of a party (humiliating her in the process), and forces her to come back to his apartment when he doesn’t want to. This is all on top of his immaturity, his anger control issues, his problem drinking, his lack of relationship experience, his toxic possessiveness, the fact that the reason his ex split up with him was due to his insistence on disregarding her opinion on a major issue that deeply mattered to her, and his stalker-type behaviour since then. This is our romantic hero. Numerous people actually like this book and agree that the above plot is wonderfully romantic. Why?

The only reason I can see is that the book portrays a male love interest who really, really wants to be with the female love interest, and this is what’s seen as romantic. He loves Abby so much he’s willing to fight for her! He’s not willing to listen to her opinion when it counts, leave her alone for her own sake, or avoid the stalker-type behaviour, but he’s willing to fight for her! And he’s somewhat changed at least some things about his behaviour for her! Doesn’t that prove it’s a great romance? So… I suppose people get so focused on the way Travis is proving how much he wants Abby that they dont see any need to think about whether he’s a person worth being with himself.

All this is then also presented within a bizarre sort of competitive framework in which multiple other women are denigrated and criticised in order to frame Abby as soooo much better than all the Other Girls, the one good-quality women amongst all the designated trash, the virgin among all the whores. So I guess if you already believe life is that sort of constant competition with others, then it must be reassuring to read about a protagonist who’s winning it.

And it’s just so damn sad and frustrating. People learn that ‘big dramatic gesture to prove he really wants you’ is the important thing rather than ‘look at who this person shows themselves to be in day-to-day life’. Women get taught to think in terms of ‘I’m better than all these whores’ rather than seeing the other women around them as people who can be potential friendships, supports, or, at a bare minimum, just people living their lives who don’t need this kind of hate or dismissal.

I did check out ‘Beautiful’ to see what McGuire would give us as the in-story explanation for why Abby thought it was worth getting back with Travis. But, nope, we don’t get one. No explanations, no justification. Abby wants to get back with Travis, so she does. The fact that she had good reasons for leaving him is just ignored, to the point where Abby flat-out blames herself for not getting back with him sooner. ‘I had made us both suffer, and I had no excuse’ Abby thinks, because every fucking time I think McGuire has got the bar as low as it can get she manages to push it a little further into the earth’s core.

Anyway, chapter’s done, and there is at least not too much left in the book. So I’ll post this now and keep pushing on through and get done with the whole thing.