[2] Charles Arrowsmith, writing for The Washington Post, said that "Like many first novels, Real Life appears to hew to its author's own experience—Taylor has written in numerous personal essays about being gay and Southern, his abusive upbringing and his experiences of sexual violence.

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.

[7] Eren Orbey, writing for The New Yorker, praised the novel for its depiction of Wallace's isolation, and for "endow[ing] his narrative with the precision of science and the intimacy of memoir".

Rather than resorting to satire or having his main character complain about microaggressions, he illustrates the "relentless abrasion of dignity that is familiar to many people of color on such campuses".

[1] Charles Arrowsmith says the "Real" of the title also points at "the insoluble, ineffable, capital-R 'Real' of philosophy", and that "what Wallace experiences as the unknowability of his friends and the inscrutability of his own actions are functions of this kind of Real-ism".

These "ambiguities", according to Arrowsmith, "are what give Taylor's writing its strengths: his receptivity to menace in the mundane, subcutaneous sexual vibrations, unconscious motivation".

Gently, slyly, he makes a point of noticing 'white people,' undermining the unspoken rule of much realist fiction that race need only be mentioned when it's other than white", and that he "humorously invert[s]" racist tropes.