Category Archives: Books

The British author Dolly Alderton writes charmingly about the woman’s perspective on love. Good Material is a fun one.  I stayed with the plot the whole way and did much highlighting on its extensive wisdom about men vs. women and its sharp observations on 30-something life. Bolding is my own.

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We shifted from overfamiliarity to inquisitiveness from sentence to sentence; alternating from feeling like old friends to strangers. We gave too much information about ourselves, then we pulled back. We got a kick out of the novelty of each other, heightening ourselves for the other one’s enjoyment…

“Reverse break-up schedules,” he explains. “When men and women break up, men hate everything about their ex-girlfriend for three months, and then they miss her, and then they think they love her, and that’s when they text her. Meanwhile, she has spent three months loving him and then she hates his guts forever,” he says, leaning in for emphasis, his breath hot and tangy with gin. “We were never meant to be with each other. Men and women are not compatible.”

“Hey mate, saw what’s happening online. Hope you’re ok.” I have no idea what he’s talking about, but there is no scenario in which this text is not one of the worst texts you can wake up to other than being informed of a death.

Complaints about people on first dates:

• Talked too much and too smugly about coming from a big family, as if it was her decision to have three siblings.
• Somehow managed to relate the plot of every film we watched back to her own life.
• Was too connected to dogs and spoke to them as if they were people.
• Too nostalgic. Couldn’t live in the present. Will always think that yesterday was better than right now. He genuinely believes the peak of his life was when he was in his early twenties and doesn’t understand that he has the power to make the best moment of his life the moment he’s living in.

Either/Or by Elif Batuman was an excellent read, worthy of its own post of Kindle highlights. All bolding my own.

It was the first time I had heard of an organizing principle or goal you could have for your life, other than making money and having kids. Nobody ever said that that was their organizing principle, but I had often noticed it, when I was growing up: the way adults acted as though trying to go anywhere or achieve anything was a frivolous dream, a luxury, compared to the real work of having kids and making money to pay for the kids.

“Either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically.” … One day, early in our friendship, Svetlana had spontaneously told me that she thought I was trying to live an aesthetic life, and that it was a major difference between us, because she was trying to live an ethical life. I wasn’t sure why the two should be opposed, and worried for a moment that she thought that I thought that it was OK to cheat or steal. But she turned out to mean something else: that I took more risks than her and cared more than she did about “style,” while she cared more about history and traditions. Soon, the “ethical and the aesthetic” was the framework we used to talk about the ways we were different. When it came to choosing friends, Svetlana liked to surround herself with dependable boring people who corroborated her in her way of being, while I was more interested in undependable people who generated different experiences or impressions.

he was able, using his “mental gifts,” to make a girl fall in love with him, “without caring to possess her in any stricter sense”: I can imagine him able to bring a girl to the point where he was sure she would sacrifice all, but when matters had come that far he left off without the slightest advance having been made on his part, and without a word having been let fall of love, let alone a declaration, a promise. Yet it would have happened, and the unhappy girl would retain the consciousness of it with double bitterness . . . she would constantly have to contend with the doubt that the whole thing might only have been imagination.

Was an equal relationship possible, or did one person always like the other person more?

Could friendships reach a stable point and stay there, or were they always either growing or shrinking?

Was every smart person funny? I thought humorlessness was the essence of stupidity. Svetlana thought she knew some genuinely smart people who happened not to be interested in whether things were funny. We agreed that Susan Sontag was not funny.

Everyone in the Turkish club seemed to have gone to the same famous high school in Istanbul. All they talked about, other than their high school, was where in Boston you could get some particular kind of cheese. (You could get it at the Armenian store in Watertown.)

I realized, with shock, that I wasn’t good at creative writing. I was good at grammar and arguing, at remembering things people said, and at making stressful situations seem funny. But it turned out these weren’t the skills you needed in order to invent quirky people and give them arcs of desire.

Ishiguro wrote first-person, but the narrator was always “unreliable,” i.e., crazy or ignorant, and different from the author. What discipline—what lack of pride! All I was ever trying to do when I wrote, I realized, was to show how much I saw and understood.

In Russian conversation class, Irina Nikolaevna spoke so quickly, using so many unknown words, that I rarely had any idea what she was saying. But sometimes something shone like a gold ring at the bottom of the stream, and a sentence came to me with perfect clarity. Like this one: “Everything you want right now, everything you want so passionately and think you’ll never get—you will get it someday.” I accidentally met her eyes, and it felt like she was talking to me. “Yes, you will get it,” she said, looking right at me, “but by that time, you won’t want it anymore. That’s how it happens.”

What Svetlana felt for Scott, she said, wasn’t a crush, but love. “A crush is about building up the self, and love is about giving from the self. For love, you have to have a self you’re secure with, to give to the other person.” I silently absorbed the implication that what I felt for Ivan was only a crush, because I didn’t have a self I was secure with.

Depositing a paycheck, I noticed, immediately produced some dissociation from whatever work you did: a job was a job.

There was something about crying so much, the way it made my body so limp and hot and shuddering, that made me feel closer to sex. Maybe there was a line where sex and total sadness touched—one of those surprising borders that turned out to exist, like the one between Italy and Slovenia.

But Svetlana had taken a banana, and was holding it up now. “It’s literally the same thing,” she said. I eyed the banana, estimating its girth at about six times that of a tampon. And yet, Svetlana wasn’t the kind of person who used “literally” to mean “figuratively.” As usual, she seemed to know what I was thinking. “It turns out Matt has a really big one,” she said, in a tone of combined exasperation, humor, and pride.

It was a strange thing how people acted as if having a kid was the best thing that could happen to anyone, even though actual parents seemed to experience most of their children’s actual childhoods as an annoyance, which they compensated for by bossing them around.

In the end, I thought the most likely explanation was that most of the people in the world just didn’t know they were allowed not to have kids. Either that, or they were too unimaginative to think of anything else to do, or too beaten-down to do whatever it was they thought of.

Whenever Leonard went to people’s houses, the men would be in the living room, talking about football, or the stock market. Leonard couldn’t survive five minutes in there; he always ended up in the kitchen with the women. They were the ones talking about stuff he actually cared about: gossip, basically, about real or fictional people.

Writers, Leonard said, were not normal people. As a writer, you were never totally present. You were always thinking of how you would put a thing into words.

if I actually listened to other people, instead of worrying so much about what I was going to say, I would notice that everyone was saying all kinds of antisocial, ignorant, or irrelevant things, which were often just a posture they were trying out, as opposed to a reflection of their essential personality, which was probably a thing that didn’t even exist.

In its simplest form, the aesthetic life involved seducing and abandoning young girls and making them go crazy.

Juho told me about how some people in Iceland treated hangovers by eating specially putrefied shark meat that had been buried for a long time in sand. “OK, I never want to talk or think about this ever again, but how long do they bury it?” “Well, a few months, I think.”

The preferred state was for me not to be fascinated. It was for me not to be thinking about the condom factory, wondering why they called it Trojan when the Trojan horse was a story about permeability, about how the Greeks swarmed out and foiled the Trojans, who had believed themselves to be protected

He tried not to show that he was upset when blood got on his skull pillow. There was something exciting about the specificity of his reaction—how precisely it delineated what he was like: considerate enough to try to hide that he was upset, but not considerate enough to try harder, or to not be upset.

On the other hand, wasn’t that what you were supposed to do: give up on the bad boy you liked, and maturely, self-respectingly accept the attentions of a less charismatic guy who had proven his essential goodness by wanting to be with you? Wasn’t that the plot of 40 percent of romantic comedies? Wasn’t it what Alanis Morissette had finally done?

Heavyset, with glasses and pockmarked skin, Sean had a pleasantly conspiratorial, over-caffeinated demeanor, like a newspaper editor in a movie.

Nothing else had ever been like the sleeplessness of Ankara. Sleep evaded and evaded you, and by the time it came it wasn’t a blessing but a curse. Now, the more you slept, the more you were eating into the next day, destroying what was left of it with depressingness, sealing the doom of the next night. When I was little, I couldn’t understand what was happening—why we had to suffer like that. It was explained to me that this was a normal part of travel, called jet lag.

I’ll read anything Leslie Jamison writes. Her memoir Splinters, about the implosion of her marriage and the love of her daughter, is as just engaging as her other writing. Many wonderful insights and sentences. My highlights from Kindle below. All bolding is my own.

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Those early days with my daughter felt like excess and hallucination. It was all too much, but when I tried to find language for it, it was nothing at all: milk and diapers, milk and diapers, milk and diapers. The astonishing revelations of caring for a baby felt shameful to claim as astonishing, or—honestly—as revelations at all. Attachment bathes every common thing in the glow of false remarkability. My love-drunk gaze made it impossible to see if anything was worth seeing.

Years later, he told me that even though I’d managed to convince the world I was a good person, he knew what lay behind this façade: the selfishness underpinning my ambition, the virtue-signaling others mistook for virtue. Some part of me believed him. Some part of me would always believe him. Where others looked at me and saw kindness, he saw the elaborate puppetry of a woman desperate for everyone to find her kind.

During our four years together, we broke up, got back together, broke up again. We moved, moved again, moved out, moved in, more or less, again. We fought. We made up. We fought. We made up. I drank. I stopped drinking. I started drinking again. I stopped drinking again. We moved back and forth between conflict and reconciliation. Always in transit. Somehow we felt most present to each other in that passage across the threshold.

I was a teenager—and already angry at him in ways I couldn’t quite name, for distances I’d grown so acclimated to I didn’t even realize how badly I didn’t want them. I bristled with indignation and a blind, molten fury that I told myself was on my mother’s behalf. And it was. But it was also on behalf of that little girl who’d been part of the home he left behind, and—though I didn’t know this yet—on behalf of the woman I would become, who recognized some version of his restlessness in herself, and wished he’d given her a different model for how to navigate it.

I didn’t ask why his day had been so bad. I’d asked this question so many times before, I thought I already knew the answers: his frustration with work, or else the unspoken hurt of our distance. Which is maybe how love dies—thinking you already know the answers. I said none of this to him—just, “Our day was great,” and let him read my tone however he wanted.

I came to hold both truths at once: I’d caused him deep and lasting harm, by leaving him. And also, I did not regret choosing a life that would not share a home with his anger. When I say I held both truths, I mean that I lay with them, sleepless, in the dark.

The baby now consented to sleep in her stroller, as long as she was moving. So we never stopped. It made me think of the movie where the bus would explode if it ever slowed down. Or how sharks need to keep swimming to breathe. I was an art shark. I never stopped walking, except to nurse.

Also, I wanted to be taken care of. I told people I wanted to enjoy my singleness, when really what I wanted was a partner. But I was embarrassed not to be enough for myself.

My hometown made me feel at ease in a way no other landscape ever would: the strip malls and cloverleaf freeway exits, the rush of salt wind on the Pacific Coast Highway, the dark silhouettes of palm trees against those startling, smog-brightened sunsets. This was where I’d gotten high with my high school boyfriend, sixteen and not a virgin anymore, driving the dark back roads thinking, not a virgin not a virgin not a virgin. These streets were the first streets I ever drove with my friends, late at night, with the radio cranked up, imagining our futures…. When I drove these streets now, it made me nostalgic for that plural state of being—imagining multiple possible lives. Now I just had this one life—with this baby, this marriage.

His loyalty through crisis, and his unflinching compassion; his awareness that everyone is more than his best or worst moments.

But nothing happened next. Or rather, this happened next: we were friends for twenty years; we were never together; I married someone else. Being an adult meant watching many possible versions of yourself whittle into just one.

The women sitting in that room were a loose net, holding pain but not absorbing it. They’d heard worse. They felt a grace that had nothing to do with getting everything they wanted. It was the grace of surviving things they hadn’t believed they could survive. The grace of one day at a time. The grace of washing stained coffeepots, cracking a bad joke in a dark time, putting one foot in front of another.

Reading a biography of Susan Sontag that winter, I put three exclamation points in the margin next to a quote from her diaries: “I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.”

Some writers hate revision, but I’ve always appreciated its clarifying adrenaline. It’s like plunging into a cold lake, or a basement plunge pool. A challenge. A scouring. Not comfortable, but exhilarating. There’s a visceral buzz that comes from removing an unnecessary sentence from a draft. In its absence, everything else is crisper, starker, more alive. In writing, these removals were a form of rigor. But in life, they felt like cruelty.

During my first weeks getting sober, when I was spending many evenings each week in church basements, I fell in love with these words from G. K. Chesterton: “How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it. You would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.” In that dark gallery, I found myself.

She made solitude look liberating, while others made it look like a grind. I knew the truth everyone knows, which is that it’s both.

The road is pure loneliness, he wrote. Or rather, dying of loneliness & dying to be alone. It’s perfect for a sober alcoholic because you only feel bliss or terror. He was a self-dramatizer who was aware of his own drama. I recognized myself in his preemptive self-awareness.

That summer I was ravenous for the world—for stoop chats on hot nights, and endless seltzer at my kitchen table, next to the open window, listening to the anonymous soap operas of strangers on the sidewalks below. I’d never felt more seduced by the city, more grateful to it. I was determined to treat the divorce not as life paused, but as life happening. Every feeling was a fucking miracle. I wanted to believe that maternal love could be bolstered by everything else you longed for—friends, work, sex, the world—rather than measured by your willingness to leave these longings unanswered.

Holding his disabled calico cat in a tight embrace against his tattooed chest. Lol, he said. But he loved it. He was so committed to his own mythology—living in the well-worn jeans of a certain sense of self—that I had trouble believing it.

Talking to him felt cozy and illuminated, like settling into the passenger seat for a long road trip, the car packed with gas-station snacks, rolling prairies beyond the windows, the buzz of everything ahead.

When I talked about the tumbleweed with friends, I’d say, Oh, I know we’re doomed, but only because I imagined us in a movie where the main character says, I know we’re doomed, and that means they aren’t doomed, after all.

This version of me spent whole days not checking his Instagram—not checking it, not checking it, not checking it—like starving myself in college, that self-denial as proof that there was some force inside me larger than my hunger. Perhaps I could call it dignity.

This wasn’t wanting. This was just wondering, What would it be like, after all these years, to feel that flush of relief again?

Kyle had given me this holiday without my daughter as an experience of presence rather than just absence. All this time, our friendship had been teaching me about ongoingness—how intimacy holds friction alongside sustenance, how pain and proximity emerge from the same honesty.

We aren’t loved in the ways we choose. We are loved in the ways we are loved.

On the page where the conductor says, “To the North Pole, of course!” I always raised my finger to point at the ceiling, and did my silliest voice for the conductor. My daughter always raised her arm at the same time, her tiny finger also pointed, giggling madly, looking up at me to see if I’d seen. I knew there would never be a word for how this felt.

Getting my heart broken by the tumbleweed was a useful pain. It told me I could still want something so much I was willing to be broken by it.

Just because a relationship didn’t last forever didn’t mean it had failed. I wanted to feel this way about the tumbleweed. I wanted to feel this way about my marriage too. Roland Barthes once asked, “Why is it better to last than to burn?” A sober heroin addict once told me, “I like being hungry. It’s my body telling me it wants to be alive.”

The chill was stark, but the sky was blue and wide open like a doorway. Both things were true, the bitter wind and the brightness of the sky. Neither one dissolved the other.

But it made me nervous to think about sharing the actuality of parenting with him: the constancy and repetition, the ways it was neither new nor revelatory in most moments, just more of itself.

When he’d first told me the story of his marriage and divorce, now seven years behind him, I could hear genuine pain in his voice, but also the well-worn grooves of an oft-told tale. I asked if he felt like he was still learning.

He would often preface things he told me about his job, his home, his exes, by saying, “The thing I always say about this is…” Letting me know I was getting a secondhand sentiment. A polished stone of selfhood.

His shower was a graveyard of expensive conditioners left by other women he’d dated. When I asked if it stirred up old feelings to see things that belonged to his exes, he said no. I nodded, receiving the news about this different way of being alive.

Table, the ex-philosopher told me that there was something about our conversations that felt unsatisfying to him. His comment was like a heat-seeking missile the universe had sent to destroy me. He actually said it this way: “It feels like our conversations are about 85 percent as good as they could be.”

Glenn Loury’s memoir is remarkable. One of the finest economists of his generation dishes on his own addiction to porn and drugs, rampant infidelity, endless lying, and all sorts of other misdeeds that most people would go out of their way to cover up — not publish. In the opening chapter, one of the most riveting I’ve ever read in a memoir, he writes:

I am going to tell you that I have lied, because I need you to believe me. I am going to tell you that I have deceived those closest to me, because I need you to trust me. I am going to tell you that I have abandoned people who needed me, because I need you to stick with me. I must tell it all in this memoir, because if I don’t tell it all, nothing I say will be heard. The skeptical reader will have observed that this game has already begun.

Glenn repeats a refrain throughout the memoir about the difference between the “cover story” and the “true story” — and his own life was full of cover spin, masking darker truths, and so it goes for many us in our presentation of self in everyday life.

Aside from all the jaw-dropping moral confessions, Glenn’s intellectual evolution is fascinating. He is an African American economist who grew up on the wrong side of town and who made his way into the most prestigious corridors of academia. Presumptions of allyship on the basis of race came from both the political left and the political right at different times in his career. But Glenn is fiercely independent, rejects labels, and at different turns and on different issues (be it affirmative action, race and crime, Obama, Trump), surprises people who thought they had him (and his worldview) figured out.

The real reason this memoir has generated so much attention, though, relates to his personal life misadventures — not his academic accomplishments. He speaks apologetically about his addictions and betrayals, although with not quite as much scathing self-judgment as one might expect. He takes a fairly balanced tone about it all, even though words of disapproval about himself appear frequently.

I don’t know Glenn personally or the players who appear in this book. But I read about his flawed mind and heart and I am not decisively repelled. I would be open to the possibility of friendship with someone like Glenn. Not that Glenn cares, but it made me think about singular moral purity tests for friendship. I don’t have them. This is borne from a recognition that things are more complex than they can seem from the outside, that almost nobody should be judged in full by their worst deeds, and that I, too, am morally flawed. To be sure, there are people who, in sum, morally repel me. But it’s often a function of their lack of self-awareness and lack of desire to improve more than it is a decisive black-and-white litmus test on particular beliefs or actions.

Some direct quotes / highlights from the memoir below.

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My bet is that this strategy of self-discrediting disclosure will accomplish two things: First, it will appease your impulse to find cracks in the edifice of my self-presentation, to search out my contradictions and too-convenient narrative contrivances.

Since I was a child, I had watched Adlert and Alfred seduce their way through the South Side. Adlert was very clear about it. Despite his professional accomplishments, he told me, point blank, that life’s goal was to “get as much pussy as you can.”

I found myself doubting that he fully grasped the pain, frustration, anger, and self-doubt many of us felt in moments such as these, when the seeming intractability of American racism made itself felt by such vicious means.

She was not the most stylish dresser, and she was not a conventional beauty in their eyes, although I found her very attractive.

She now knows for sure that there is someone in my life I’m not telling her about. I know that she knows. She knows that I know that she knows. But, amidst this intersubjective game of tacit consent and thinly veiled deceit, neither of us ever lets on that we know what we know, even though my infidelity has now become common knowledge between us.

I was overcome by a sense of panic. None of it seemed good enough to live up to what was expected of me or to what I expected of myself or to what I saw my peers doing. My research questions just weren’t big enough, I felt; my insights were insufficiently deep and original. Along with this terrifying suspicion that I could not measure up came an old, familiar feeling: I really was choking.

It’s the excitement that comes from the adventure of entering an unknown situation with an unknown person and betting that I can charm my way past whatever reservations she may have.

I had met Bennett previously, and he and I got along well. He had a sharp mind and a sharper tongue. I liked him. Although he made his name as a crusader for family values and public morality, behind the scenes he was a bit of a hedonist. The first time I saw him in a private setting, I was astonished by his appetite for alcohol. Who was I to judge? I had my own appetites.

A baby would mean I would have to curtail my affairs and flings. I knew what having an infant in the house was like, and it would be almost impossible to continue to exercise my right as a Master of the Universe to seduce any woman I could, whenever I wanted to.

…can be a little like talking about Israel with a Jewish American. Just as an otherwise liberal Jew can take a surprisingly hardline stance on the Israel-Palestine issue, even some conservative African Americans buckle down and shake their heads if you question affirmative action. In such matters, the call of the tribe can ring out louder even than political ideology or, indeed, than reason itself.

I still considered them friends. But America in Black and White represented a viewpoint that had, I felt, led conservatives down the path to apathy and, at times, to a kind of smug satisfaction at the failures of the policies they abhorred.

It seemed to me that I was being instructed by my conservative colleagues not to think, and to choose sides between my political affiliations and my race, my tribe. I felt compromised.

But it seemed to me that stigma could be more readily explained as both a rational response to a set of social circumstances and the cause of those circumstances. Imagine the case of the stereotypical New York City cab driver who does not want to stop for young black men because he fears being robbed. He believes picking up a young black man to be less wise than picking up, say, an old white lady, because he believes that young black men are, on the whole, more likely to rob him than old white ladies. Now let’s also say that, as a statistical matter, the cabbie is correct. No matter how unlikely he is to be robbed by a young black man, he is still more likely to be robbed by one than by an old white lady. Cabbies then rarely choose to pick up young black men. But when this happens, young black men who are simply looking to hail a taxi will notice that it’s almost impossible to get one to stop. They’ll then find some other means to get where they’re going and eventually stop bothering to even try to hail a cab. As a result, cabbies who engage in biased profiling will have incentivized law-abiding riders to take themselves out of the pool of potential fares and also increased the likelihood that any young black man looking for a ride will be a robber, as only robbers will be left. In that case, the cabbie will be acting rationally when he sees one of them trying to flag him down and keeps driving. Through this rational behavior, he will also have brought into being the very state of affairs to which he is reacting.

I showed that biased social cognition can go a long way to explaining any number of forms of racial inequality, and without relying on the idea that such inequality is necessarily the result of racial animus or malice. Ordinary people and institutions can respond to incentives in totally rational ways that actually create and perpetuate the very stigmas they are responding to.

suggested to me that in my lecture I had described something like a bank run on black people. That had never occurred to me, but Larry was right! A bank run happens when people come to believe that their bank is going to run out of money. Believing their savings to be at risk, they all, in a totally rational fashion, attempt to withdraw it at the same time. But when everyone tries to withdraw all their funds at the same time, the bank actually does run out of money, which does put the savings of anyone who didn’t make it to the bank in time at risk. A shared belief about some state of affairs, regardless of whether or not it is unavoidably true, brings that state of affairs into being.

“I never understood what you got out of those relationships.” I cannot deny that his bemusement spoke well of him. I didn’t really answer his question at the time, but there was an answer: Nothing could define me. I wasn’t reducible to “economist” or “Christian” or “black man” or even “husband” or “father.” I was those things, certainly. But I was much more than that. This was my life. I was only going to get one shot at it, and if I saw a way to broaden my experience, to enlarge my world,

Some years earlier, Richard John Neuhaus was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer that he thought would kill him. He survived, but in the intervening period, when he believed he was facing death, he wrote As I Lay Dying, a book about the experience of preparing yourself for the end of life. I read this book to Linda in bed, and we both took solace from its wisdom.

I also found a self-help book in her library. It was about learning to forgive those who have wronged you. As I leafed through the pages, I saw that Linda, ever the diligent scholar, had underlined passages and scribbled notes to herself in the margins. Many of those notes clearly referenced things I had done. She made a study of forgiving me. Perhaps that’s what it took to live with me. I had to be treated as a miniature research project.

An absent father was no doubt a difficult thing to deal with, but his life was one of prep schools and elite universities and the political fast track. I don’t think that one must undergo hardship in order to lay claim to their blackness, but the dissonance between Obama’s claim to represent “the black experience” and his actual life experience was just too grating for me to ignore. My childhood friend Woody was “blacker” than Obama, as far as I was concerned.

None of the disqualifications of Trump that his critics listed—ceaselessly, day after day, year after year—could negate the gut-level satisfaction I got from watching him. Sure, he lied constantly, but Americans had become so inured to the dishonesty of their politicians that it was actually a relief to hear someone lie with brazenness and glee, instead of prevaricating and equivocating while pretending they had a claim on moral authority.

enforced silence in a marriage is just as unsustainable as rancor.

In my seventies, I have nothing left to prove and nothing to hide. Whatever promise the young man showed sitting in Mr. Reffels’s solid geometry class at John Marshall Harlan High School has long since come to fruition. I now find myself receiving honors that point backward to what I have accomplished in the past rather than garnering grants that anticipate what I might yet accomplish in the future.

It sometimes seems acceptable to do that which I, inspired by Václav Havel, had fought so hard against: “to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudo-life.”

Here are Kindle highlights from two books that cover themes of friendship, love, and grief. The first is Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival, a collection of essays and musings that Andrew Sullivan published in 1999 essays. Some great passages about friendship. Anything Andrew writes, I read.

The second is Stay True by Hua Hsu, a memoir about growing up a child of immigrants and, among other things, forging a deep friendship. Stay True recently won the Pulitzer Prize for memoir. Thanks to John Krakauer for the recommendation.

Love Undetectable by Andrew Sullivan

For, of all our relationships, friendship is the most common and the most natural. In its universality, it even trumps family. Many of us fail to marry, and many more have no children; others never know their mother or father, and plenty have no siblings. But any human being who has ever lived for any time has had a friend. It is a relationship available to and availed by all of us. It is at once the most particular and the most universal relationship there is.

It is as if only in the death of a friend that a true reckoning with mortality is ever fully made, before it is too late, which is why so many theologians for so long saw friendship as an integral and vital part of a truly spiritual life.

A really good friend, indeed, might be defined as someone whom you need not see for a year or so, or even longer, and yet, when you next get together, it is as if nothing has happened. The relationship snaps instantly back into place, as if the year were a matter of hours.

Equally, it could be said that one’s friends are simply those people with whom one spends one’s life. Period. Anything else is a form of rationalization.

And I don’t mean what Saint Paul meant by love, the Christian notion of indiscriminate and universal agape or caritas, which is based on the universal love of the Christian God. I mean love in the banal, ubiquitous, compelling, and resilient modern meaning of love: the romantic love that obliterates all other goods, the love to which every life must apparently lead, the love that is consummated in sex and celebrated in every particle of our popular culture, the love that is institutionalized in marriage and instilled as a primary and ultimate good in every Western child. I mean eros, which is more than sex but is bound up with sex. I mean the longing for union with another being, the sense that such a union resolves the essential quandary of human existence, the belief that only such a union can abate the loneliness that seems to come with being human, and deter the march of time that threatens to trivialize our very existence.

friendship delivers what love promises but fails to provide. The contrasts between the two are, in fact, many, and largely damning to love’s reputation. Where love is swift, for example, friendship is slow. Love comes quickly, as the song has it, but friendship ripens with time. If love is at its most perfect in its infancy, friendship is most treasured as the years go by.

In love, so many hazardous uncertainties in life are resolved: the constant negotiation with other souls, the fear and distrust that lie behind almost every interaction, the petty loneliness that we learned to live with as soon as we grew apart from our mother’s breast. We lose all this in the arms of another. We come home at last to a primal security, made manifest by each other’s nakedness.

But I am saying that this is the principle to which all love finally pays homage, the criterion by which such relationships are ultimately to be judged. It is, of course, a sublime experience, almost inhuman, because it is about the loss of the self-control which ultimately makes us who we are. And with that loss of control comes mutual power, the power to calm, the power to redeem, and the power to hurt. In some relationships, one partner holds that ultimate power, and the love is unequal. But in those relationships, the other partner must want to be powerless, yearn to be controlled or held, if the underlying principle of love is not to be undermined. And in other relationships, the power is distributed and redistributed from day to day and hour to hour and, sometimes, minute to minute. It will always differ, of course, in how it is given expression. But the principle is the same: it is a principle of control, of giving and retaining it, of wielding and begging for it. It is a strange mix of choice

How many of us can say that about love in its highest form, a love that elevates us like a narcotic and addicts us to its redemptive power? But friendship is for those who do not want to be saved, for those whose appreciation of life is here and now and whose comfort in themselves is sufficient for them to want merely to share rather than to lose their identity. And they enter into friendship as an act of radical choice. Friendship, in this sense, is the performance art of freedom.

If you enter a friendship to be less lonely, then it is not a friendship; if you enter it to find out something, then you are fooling yourself; if you enter it for profit or even the chance to meet others, then you have no understanding of it. Love solves a need, answers a calling, scratches an itch. Friendship does none of these things. It merely flourishes, a sign that human beings can choose one another for company, enjoy each other’s selves, and accompany each other on an enterprise, with no thought of gain or purpose. In a utilitarian world, it is useless in the best sense of the word. It resists the meaning of anything but itself.

The fear of male intimacy, which is intrinsically connected to a fear of homosexuality, has too often denied straight men the bonds they need to sustain themselves through life’s difficulties. When they socialize, they too often demand the chaperone of sports or work to avoid the appearance of being gay. Or they need to congregate in groups that tend to diminish the quiet intimacy that all of us need.

Stay True by Hua Hsu

[Youth] At that age, time moves slow. You’re eager for something to happen, passing time in parking lots, hands deep in your pockets, trying to figure out where to go next. Life happened elsewhere, it was simply a matter of finding a map that led there. Or maybe, at that age, time moves fast; you’re so desperate for action that you forget to remember things as they happen.

[On immigrants] The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories. I often try to spin the details and small effects of my parents’ lives into a narrative. How did they acquire a sense of taste or decide which movies to see?

The things around them were like the raw materials for new American identities, and they foraged as far as their car or the subway line could take them.

we were both sifting, store to store, for some possible future—that we were both mystified by the same fashions, trends, and bits of language. That my late-night trips to the record store with my dad had been about discovery, not mastery. Later still, I came to recognize that assimilation as a whole was a race toward a horizon that wasn’t fixed. The ideal was ever shifting, and your accent would never be quite perfect. It was a set of compromises sold to you as a contract. Assimilation was not a problem to be solved but the problem itself.

But I saw coolness as a quality primarily expressed through erudite discernment, and I defined who I was by what I rejected, a kitchen-sink approach to negation that resulted in essays decrying Beverly Hills, 90210, hippies, private school, George Bush, braided leather belts, the police state, and, after they became trendy, Pearl Jam. I knew what I was against, but I couldn’t imagine what stood on the other side.

…I was a diligent scholar. I knew all the bands that sounded a bit like Nirvana that nobody had heard of yet. I prized research: the excavation of arcane tributaries, secret knowledge, and conspiratorial anecdotes, building new religions around has-beens or never-weres.

Ken lived too loud a life, at least by my standards. I had met hundreds of him, hundreds of times before. I was eighteen, in love with my moral compass, perpetually suspicious of anyone whose words came too easily. He was a genre of person I actively avoided—mainstream. Ken was flagrantly handsome; his voice betrayed no insecurity.

Now that I was a college student, I tried to rebrand myself as someone who was outspoken, hopefully in a charmingly digressive way. Someone who knew a little about everything and fancied weighing in on stuff; this was how I hoped I came across when writing my zine.

He was boisterously overfamiliar, and I could never tell if he was making fun of me.

There are many currencies to friendship. We may be drawn to someone who makes us feel bright and hopeful, someone who can always make us laugh. Perhaps there are friendships that are instrumental, where the lure is concrete and the appeal is what they can do for us. There are friends we talk to only about serious things, others who only make sense in the blitzed merriment of deep night. Some friends complete us, while others complicate us. Maybe you feel as if there were nothing better in the world than driving in a car, listening to music with friends, looking for an all-night donut shop. Nobody says a thing, and it is perfect…For others, it’s the sporadic intimacy of effortlessly resuming conversations or inside jokes left dormant for years.

What does it mean to truly be yourself? Around this time, in the mid-1990s, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor began thinking about how people throughout history had dealt with this question of individual identity.

It turned out the Beach Boys were pretty good. Everything about the group was inauthentic: only one of them actually surfed, they were more indoor than outdoor kids, and whatever good vibes they conjured were incidental. Their breezy harmonies were less a reflection of collaboration and friendship than the bandleader Brian Wilson’s micromanagement. He became so obsessed with translating his psychedelic visions into sound that it pushed him to the edge of reason.

But this was exactly why Derrida resisted the eulogy form. It’s always about “me” rather than “we,” the speaker burnishing his emotional credentials rather than offering a true account of the deceased.

A celebration of how it began, rather than a chronicle of free fall, a tribute to that first sip, rather than all the spinning rooms that followed. It would be an account of love and duty, not just anger and hatred, and it would be filled with dreams, and the memory of having once looked to the future, and an eagerness to dream again. It would be boring, because you simply had to be there. It would be poetry and not history.

But she had helped me rearrange some of the furniture in my mind. I knew what I needed to do now, I told her. I needed to figure out how to describe the smell of secondhand smoke on flannel, the taste of pancakes with fresh strawberries and powdered sugar the morning after, sun hitting a specific shade of golden brown, the deep ambivalence you once felt toward a song that now devastated you, the threshold when a pair of old boots go from new to worn, the sound of our finals week mixtape wheezing to the end of its spool. Which metaphors were useful and which were not, what to explain and what to keep secret. The look when someone recognizes you.