“Support Group” is an awkwardly
funny story about a young man (I took him to be in his mid to late twenties)
who is at a meeting for people who have been sexually abused, pouring his heart
out in a rambling attempt to detail how he began his current life as a chronic
masturbator when he was eleven and how it has proceeded to dictate his life.
As soon as I read the first few
lines, I began to laugh and couldn’t stop throughout and at the end I got the
impression that you thought this up on a whim just to see how far you could
take it just to get the class to discuss masturbation in full and I must say,
bravo. This was very entertaining and you did a great job characterizing a man
with a major insecurity but there were some things that were off a bit.
Even though I found it funny, there
are some parts I didn’t quite understand. First off, I don’t know much of the narrator
other than his embarrassing condition. All we have is a long narration without
any setting built up and a nervous man babbling on about his problem. And
second, I think you should go through and change up some of his vocabulary. It was
funny the first couple of times but got old pretty quick.
I liked the entire story as dialogue
but I think you could spruce it up by having other people in the group question
the narrator about his lifestyle and have him justify his reasoning to compare
himself to people who are sexually abused. Right now, that to me is a strong
source of tension and you highlighted it perfectly with the Chris Hanson jokes
and failed female interaction, but I would also like to see an expansion of
that so we can get a real change to occur. He seems to have a moment of
sincerity on the last page when he says he wants to help everyone else there,
but then makes an excuse to leave, which I took to be just an exit to go
masturbate once again.
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