Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix (Remixed Classics)

by Anna-Marie McLemore

Please let him come to New York? I promise, he’ll have the gayest of times.

Oh I’m sure he will

Daisy glanced toward me, one hand under her chin. That glance told me that if people like us wanted to make something of ourselves in a world ruled by men as pale as their own dinner plates, we had to lie.

This is such an interesting twist to the original novel!!

We men know what’s important, don’t we, Nick?” He winked at me in a way that made dinner lurch in my stomach.

Tom is so fucking stupid lmao

Yours eternally, Daisy

Are Daisy and Jordan a thing in this book??

“A self-sufficient man. I knew I liked you,” he shouted as he pulled away, the wake kicking up foam. “I always tell Daisy, I just have a sense about people.”

What’s so fascinating is that Tom is exactly like this in the original book. He likes Nick A LOT. Practically manhandles him with affection. It’s so ironic and so fucking hilarious.

That image of Daisy, emerging from the ocean like Venus on her shell, left her name on every tongue. It set her star among the constellations of famous socialites.

“I think we just recognize each other.” He fastened the buttons on the gleaming brown shirt. “Boys like us always know one another about a thousand years before anyone else knows us, don’t we?”

:,)

He looked at me so strangely then. It was such a queer, enraptured look that I thought he might be about to kiss me, but what a thought that was. Boys like Gatsby didn’t kiss boys like me, if they ever kissed boys at all.

Bruhhhhh the yeARNING

I wondered what it took to maintain such a sense of romance.

Same, Nick. Same.

“Anybody would be happy to see you,” I said. His smile was a needle of sun piercing a gray scrim of clouds. And perhaps it was this, how he could be touched by so small a compliment, that made me understand all he’d stored up in his heart.

Good LORD

I worried that, one day, this would be the thing to ruin the dream of Daisy and Gatsby. She reveled in making glamorous messes, and he followed after her, quietly cleaning them up.

….well.

There was such care to how her fingers slipped under the cuff of her shirt, as though checking that something was still there and hadn’t slipped off and gotten lost. Maybe a piece of jewelry inherited from a great-grandmother. But the gesture was so quick that there was no natural way to ask.

…could Daisy be here lover?! That would be wild.

I had learned that so long as I acted as though he had something to teach me, Tom Buchanan liked me.

Tom is such an asshole

The hope on Gatsby’s face could have lit every lamp in the garden.

“Who’s waiting for us?” I asked. “Where are we going?” Gatsby looked back at me how any boy in the world would want to be looked at—as though there was such infinite possibility in me, such infinite light, that I was one endless, longest day of the year. “Come on,” Gatsby said, and so I did.

Oh these bitches are SO GAY

He was close enough that I could smell his cologne, something green growing under rain, like wild clary. Alongside the dark wood shelves of his bedroom, I felt the dividing pull of something between lovesickness and homesickness. The green of that cologne and the deep wood called up Wisconsin trees.

I was a moon for him to throw sunlight on. In the glow of Gatsby’s gaze or laugh, I was luminous. When he directed the ray of his attention on my cousin—my beautiful, white-passing cousin—I was a cold and forbidding landscape.

Tom had just realized that Daisy was in love with Jay Gatsby. I had just realized that so was I.

Please, claim me. Claim the brown of my skin and the black of my hair and my eyes that are a darker version of yours. Daisy Fabrega-Caraveo, admit that I’m yours.

This is so heartbreaking

He would always choose watching my cousin across the sound over anyone close enough for him to touch.

I tried to acquaint myself with the idea that an insult could be reclaimed into something softer, something fit for the space inside a heart or between sheets.

In the dark, Gatsby talked of growing up poor in North Dakota, raised by his aunt and the woman his aunt called her roommate. He hadn’t seen them in years, and since they had no telephone, they corresponded only in letters and the money he sent them monthly.

This is canon. Gatsby was raised by gay aunts and you can’t tell me otherwise.

Gatsby was a self-made boy, in so many ways. He had sandpapered down his accent and taught himself to say sofa instead of couch, to toast good health instead of cheers. But Gatsby’s life, the dazzling parties and pressed shirts, were as much a reaction against what he’d lived as it was a display for Daisy or anyone else. He was now a version of himself so utterly incompatible with North Dakota dust and blood-tainted mud that he might think of these things as belonging to someone else. He had carried the shame of it and then beat it back into the past with the light of a hundred chandeliers.

Gatsby and I may have been nothing to men like Tom Buchanan, but men like that did not know we were as divine as the heavens. We were boys who had created ourselves. We had formed our own bodies, our own lives, from the ribs of the girls we were once assumed to be.

This is such a beautiful quote and I’m so happy a book like this exists.

But Gatsby wanted Daisy. How I felt for him, he didn’t feel for anyone except her. And if he felt any shadow of that longing for me, it was only because I was some convenient substitute for Daisy. I was desirable for no reason except that I was on his side of the bay. I was more reachable than the ribbon of green light cast on the water.

There were just some charmed, beautiful people in the world, and they were always destined for each other. Gatsby and Daisy. Jordan and whichever man one day captured her attention. The couples in the club behind the florist. I wasn’t one of them. And it had nothing to do with the brown of my skin or being the kind of boy I was. It had to do with the splinter of cynicism I carried in my heart. Some people wore their broken hearts with careful grace. I didn’t. The pieces of mine scraped against everything, and everyone could hear the grinding noise, even if they didn’t know what it was.

Daisy Fay had distanced herself from my brown skin and black hair. She had denounced me like a false religion.