What do you think?
Rate this book
Nothing is Terrible
Matthew Sharpe's debut collection, Stories from the Tube, was praised in the Los Angeles Times Book Review for its "wildly effective-and often touching-collisions of the banal and the surreal." Wired called it "unsettling, lovely, creepy"; Forbes FYI heralded it as a "remarkable fiction debut." In Nothing Is Terrible , his first novel, Sharpe astonishes once again with the hallucinatory and hilarious story of a girl's unusual coming-of-age and her search for love in unlikely places.
Her name is Mary White, though she prefers to be called Paul, the name of her ill-fated twin brother. Bright, pragmatic, irreverent, and orphaned, she is being raised by her clueless aunt and uncle and fears she may be about to drown in dull suburban torpor-until she falls in love with her new sixth-grade teacher, Miss Skip Hartman. Devoted teacher and pupil run off to live in New York City, where Mary receives a very unconventional education (art dealers, drug dealers, boyfriends, epic piercings) and discovers redemptive power in even the most unorthodox kind of love, all of which she relates in the most Brontëan gentle-reader tone.
In Nothing Is Terrible , Matthew Sharpe takes the bildungsroman and turns it upside down and inside out. Like a breakneck sprint through a Manhattan house of mirrors, it offers readers a giddily literate tour of the resourceful mind of a singular young woman.
Her name is Mary White, though she prefers to be called Paul, the name of her ill-fated twin brother. Bright, pragmatic, irreverent, and orphaned, she is being raised by her clueless aunt and uncle and fears she may be about to drown in dull suburban torpor-until she falls in love with her new sixth-grade teacher, Miss Skip Hartman. Devoted teacher and pupil run off to live in New York City, where Mary receives a very unconventional education (art dealers, drug dealers, boyfriends, epic piercings) and discovers redemptive power in even the most unorthodox kind of love, all of which she relates in the most Brontëan gentle-reader tone.
In Nothing Is Terrible , Matthew Sharpe takes the bildungsroman and turns it upside down and inside out. Like a breakneck sprint through a Manhattan house of mirrors, it offers readers a giddily literate tour of the resourceful mind of a singular young woman.
- GenresFiction
284 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
About the author
Matthew Sharpe
40 books30 followersMatthew Sharpe (born 1962) is a U.S. novelist and short story writer. Born in New York City, but grew up in a small town in Connecticut. Sharpe graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio. Afterwards, he worked at US Magazine until he went back to school at Columbia University, where he pursued an MFA. Since then, he has been teaching creative writing at various institutions including Columbia University, Bard College, the New College of Florida, and Wesleyan University. Sharpe says he started writing fiction at age ten but was finally inspired and encouraged to be a writer after reading Sam Shepard's play La Turista when he was 21.
Matthew Sharpe is the author of the novels Nothing Is Terrible (Villard, 2000), The Sleeping Father (Soft Skull, 2003, translated into nine languages), Jamestown (Soft Skull, 2007) and You Were Wrong (Bloomsbury, 2010) as well as the short-story collection Stories from the Tube (Villard, 1998). He teaches creative writing at Wesleyean University. His stories and essays have appeared in Harper's, Zoetrope, BOMB, McSweeney's, American Letters & Commentary, Southwest Review, and Teachers & Writers magazine.
Matthew Sharpe is the author of the novels Nothing Is Terrible (Villard, 2000), The Sleeping Father (Soft Skull, 2003, translated into nine languages), Jamestown (Soft Skull, 2007) and You Were Wrong (Bloomsbury, 2010) as well as the short-story collection Stories from the Tube (Villard, 1998). He teaches creative writing at Wesleyean University. His stories and essays have appeared in Harper's, Zoetrope, BOMB, McSweeney's, American Letters & Commentary, Southwest Review, and Teachers & Writers magazine.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
July 6, 2009
Kinda disturbing, but engrossing. A common story from a different perspective.
February 5, 2019
I stopped at page 200 because one of my resolutions was to not waste time doing things I didn't enjoy.
This book had all the things that drive me up a wall--irreverence/cheap shocks masquerading as wit/comedy/satire(?), muddled literary allusions, a bunch of characters who don't actually have to work for a living, vague entitled references to marginalized groups without every going in deeper, and male authors writing a bunch of female characters incredibly poorly.
(I am trying so hard to avoid the low-hanging fruit about what is terrible...)
This book had all the things that drive me up a wall--irreverence/cheap shocks masquerading as wit/comedy/satire(?), muddled literary allusions, a bunch of characters who don't actually have to work for a living, vague entitled references to marginalized groups without every going in deeper, and male authors writing a bunch of female characters incredibly poorly.
(I am trying so hard to avoid the low-hanging fruit about what is terrible...)
August 19, 2009
"Nothing Is Terrible," except this book. Rare tiny bits of sense are mixed in with so much insensible dreck, it's like trying to sip a glassful of champagne that's been dispersed in a vat of motor oil. Matthew Sharpe shows some facility of quirkiness with words but the content is so annoying that you just don't care. It wants to be clever like "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" or "Running With Scissors" but fails utterly.
August 31, 2011
This book is awful. It takes emotional abuse, physical abuse, and sex abuse (all aimed at a child) and contorts them into a "good" thing. It's just pages and pages of awfulness until the end, when it's implied that the trauma just continues on. It's well-written, but too disturbing for that to make up for any of it. It's not uplifting, it's not enlightening. It's just dark, twisted, and sad.
July 8, 2012
The title of this book is ironic, considering how terrible this book is from beginning to end. It starts by ripping off the movie, "My Girl", and gets worse from that point. I kept hoping it would get better, but I couldn't wait for it to end. I wish there was a way to refund myself for the time I wasted.
January 8, 2008
One of the most bizarre books I have ever read. I found it bizarre for bizarre's sake and incredibly disturbing. I ended up skimming parts of it because if I wasn't disturbed, then I was bored. If you are disturbed by child sexual abuse, don't read it. Had I known I would have never bought it.
January 10, 2009
I wasn't sure what to expect when I picked up this book. It was strange and heartbreaking with every paragraph, yet I had to keep reading. At the end I just had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.
March 24, 2009
Strange, sometimes unsettling, sometimes just too unbelieveable to be affecting, but sometimes Sharpe will rein in the narrative with some absolutely precise observation via Mary. I will definitely look for his other books.
February 11, 2012
Much like its protagonist, this book is always hinting at the development of something serious and tangible, but it never fully outgrows its childish, two-dimensional tendencies.
June 12, 2016
Unsettling that as a reader I am complicit in Mary's abuse.
July 1, 2009
Seriously one of my favorite books of all time.
June 28, 2016
Entertaining book and fun writing style.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews