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Real Life (novel)Real Life is the 2020 debut novel of Alabama-born American writer Brandon Taylor. Described as a campus novel and a coming-of-age novel, the partly autobiographical book tells of the experiences of a gay, Black doctoral student in a predominantly White, Midwestern PhD program.

Plot
Wallace is a gay, Black student from a small town in Alabama who is enrolled in a PhD program in biochemistry at a predominantly White university in a Midwestern town. He is the first Black student admitted to the program in decades and is considering dropping out. The narrative starts shortly after one of Wallace's experiments (involving the culturing of nematodes) has gone wrong, and he suspects one of his fellow students of having sabotaged it. The novel takes place over the course of a weekend, which alternates between gatherings with his (White) friends, moments of solitude, a session in his lab, and a number of steamy encounters with his friend Miller. Further events from his past are narrated through flashbacks, and they include the death of Wallace's father a few weeks before the start of the novel, his absence at the funeral, his difficult relationship with his mother, the sexual abuse suffered at the hands of a family friend. Part of the recent trauma for Wallace is an experiment most likely ruined for him by a fellow White student, and when early in the novel Wallace is confronted with the likely sabotage of his nematodes experiment, he does not even try to make the case for foul play to his supervisor.

Wallace has sexual encounters with a fellow student called Miller, a young man who claims to be straight and initiates the affair, and throughout the narrative Wallace is trying to come to terms with his own mixed feelings. After their first night together, for instance, Wallace leaves without saying goodbye, and later struggles with his inability to see Miller as a human being who also deserves consideration and sympathy.

That Wallace is the only Black person in the program and one of only a few in the community is the cause of a few poignant scenes in the novel: being mistaken for a drug dealer at a campus store, attending a fundraising party for wealthy White patrons who in quiet voices discuss the changing demographics of the program, a visit to another student's house for a party, where at the door he is asked whether he is lost, a French fellow student who suggests to him he should be grateful to have a place in the program, since, he says, Black people should cherish and be grateful for the opportunities given to them. But Wallace also struggles to recognize when others have such experiences, such as those of an Asian-American fellow student, whom he dismisses as he dismissed Miller�and then scolds himself for it.

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