Category Archives: Books

Here are some highlights from a dozen books I’ve read recently. My comments in italics, the rest are direct quotes from the books (chosen for the point made or the eloquence of prose), and all bolding is my own.

Wellness: A Novel by Nathan Hill

A well written novel about middle age.

She tucks her legs under them as she sits in her plush velvet armchair, a few candles glowing nearby, her face impassive and cool, holding a book in one hand, the other hand idly tracing the lip of a wineglass. He watches her touch that glass and wonders how a little fingertip can inspire such a large torment.

His apartment—a desolate little box of unadorned white walls and a cinder-block bookshelf and a futon condemned to the floor—is not a home that anticipates guests. Loneliness, it seems, holds him like a buttonhole.

Jack and Elizabeth now found themselves, at the bottom of that curve, in midlife, a period that was notable not for its well-publicized “crisis” (actually a pretty rare phenomenon—only 10 percent of people reported having one) but for its slow ebb into a quiet and often befuddling restlessness and dissatisfaction.

No, the way she said goodbye to him each night was the way everyone signed off on all of the YouTube channels he followed, which Toby found weirdly comforting: “Don’t forget to subscribe,” she whispered softly, near his ear. “Don’t forget to subscribe,” he said, facedown, his words muffled by the pillow.

She leans into the kiss and they make out—leisurely, then passionately, then tenderly, then back to passionately—just kissing for forty-five minutes straight,

“But I’ve seen you with your husband. You do not lack for romance.” “Seriously, Elizabeth, go have an affair. Or better yet, tell Jack to have an affair. Afterward, he will be a thousand percent more attractive to you. It’s like witchcraft.”

A prairie does not have the grandeur of a mountain range, nor the austerity of a desert, nor the gothic mystery of a forest, nor the romance of the sea. A prairie is a lawn, and it’s hard to have extravagant feelings about a lawn. Jack has a theory about this, about why the prairie is a disrespected landscape, why when we see it, we don’t really see it: it’s because you can’t capture a prairie in a picture. It is notoriously difficult to depict a prairie two-dimensionally. Even to the naked eye, it already looks flat—this despite the fact that walking the Flint Hills can be exhausting…

“Marriage, my dear, is a condition whereby you find so many qualities within another person that you want to have within you that you’re willing to take on their flaws, which will, by extension, also be within you, for life.”

The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Fantastic new novel from the living legend.

He believed himself to be more interesting than he was – but then who didn’t? Did I know anyone who genuinely thought themselves uninteresting?

‘The main thing is to have a purpose, not necessarily to achieve it.’ Kristian Hadeland, 1985

But it’s not necessarily about being seen in the sense of being validated, even if for many artists that can be a driving force. Art basically is about communication. Every work of art is an expression of something. But in order for the work to actually convey anything at all, in order for it to actually exist, then clearly it has to be seen. So, no work of art in fact exists until it’s seen. Without an audience, it remains meaningless.’

A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhirst

A gripping true story account of a couple that sets sail on a small boat, their boat capsizes, and then they find a way to survive at sea.

Trapped inside a person, grief can feel like a rising tide of water, something vast and dramatic requiring release. But once spoken, it tends to reveal itself to be the same, small essential things, over and over. He missed her. He struggled without her. He wished she were still there.

The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities by John J. Mearsheimer

One of the most incisive foreign policy analysts shares a range of thoughts on foreign policy worldviews.

In sum, I begin with two simple assumptions about human nature: there are significant limits on our ability to reason about first principles, and we are social animals at our core.

There has never been anything approximating a universal consensus on what constitutes the good life, and no good reason to think there ever will be.

Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery by Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson

One of the canonical introductions to Enneagram personality tests.

Every shift of emotion, every variation of warmth or cooling by others registers immediately in the Three’s psyche, in the same way that a sunbather can tell when the thinnest cloud comes between him and the sun.

Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life by Agnes Callard

A provocative set of reflections cultivating a philosophical outlook. A bit academic but instructive on Socrates.

There’s a question you are avoiding. Even now, as you read this sentence, you’re avoiding it. You tell yourself you don’t have time at the moment; you’re focused on making it through the next fifteen minutes. There is a lot to get done in a day. There are the hours you spend at your job, the chores to take care of at home. There are movies to be seen, books to be read, music to be listened to, friendships to catch up on, vacations to be taken. Your life is full. It has no space for the question, “Why am I doing any of this?”

Many of us have become gifted at endowing everyday tasks with such urgency: I “must” go to the store, I “have to” get to work, I “need to” call my parents, I am “very busy”—after all of which I probably “deserve” a break during which the last thing I want to do is embark upon an exhausting existential inquiry. We learn to take life fifteen minutes at a time. And if you add up enough of those fifteen-minute periods, the sum total is a whole life. This is what T. S. Eliot refers to when he writes, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” We find a way to avoid ever asking, “What will come from my whole life?”

Thinking, as Socrates understands it, is not something that happens in your head, but rather out loud, in conversation. Socrates argues that it is only by recognizing thinking as a social interaction that we can resolve a set of paradoxes as to how thinking can be open-minded, inquisitive, and truth-oriented. The Socratic motto is not, “Question everything,” but “Persuade or be persuaded.”

Socratic ethics is the ethics of living a truly philosophical life, and it tells you that the way you should conduct yourself in each of these three domains is: inquisitively. It promises to make people freer and more equal; more romantic; and more courageous.

Instead of adding to our store of knowledge—as the biographer, or the cartographer, or the biologist might—Socrates demonstrates that we already have, in us, ideas we do not quite know how to live up to. Learning philosophy is less like filling a void and more like untying a knot. Philosophy begins not in ignorance, not in wonder, but in error.

We reflexively engage in a kind of interpersonal balancing: if I admit I am bad at something, then you have to say you’re also bad at something, or point out that I’m good at something else. We are anxious to even out the appearance of difference in abilities, in social standing, in success. We are especially vigilant in policing asymmetries of affection: if I want to be talking to you more than you want to be talking to me, that is something that it is rarely permissible to be explicit about.

Colored Television by Danzy Senna

Great novel about ambition and race and other topics.

She called her mother one night and confessed something shameful: she wanted to settle down, have a few kids, live in the suburbs. Her mother, the aging beatnik, perpetually single, said that she couldn’t believe she’d raised a daughter who had such bourgeois Restoration Hardware fantasies. Wasn’t it ironic, she said, how women spent their twenties trying to catch a man and have his babies, then spent the next decade wishing they could escape through a bathtub drain? Settling down was just a euphemism for inching toward death.

Jane had discovered somewhere along the way that if you did not have money there were benefits to hanging around with people who did. Rich friends got divorced, or they got restless; they went away on sabbaticals and film shoots and retreats. They didn’t stay in one place, and they needed people to watch their possessions or pets or plants.

One of the worst parts of teaching was how, like a series of mini strokes, it ruined you as a writer. A brain could handle only so many undergraduate stories about date rape and eating disorders, dead grandmothers and mystical dogs. A brain could take only so much purple prose and mechanical epiphany.

She too had parents who were overeducated and underpaid—it was the worst combination. They had raised her and her sister in a ghetto of artists and poets, guaranteeing that they would be alienated from rich children and poor children alike, thanks to a cultural and political vocabulary that suggested class and privilege without actual class and privilege—gauche caviar without the actual caviar. Jane remembered wishing at a certain point, Ruby’s age maybe, that she came from a dignified working-class immigrant family. Her kind of poverty was the loneliest kind, the least dignified kind, because her parents had chosen it. They had picked poetry over profit.

Dennis Mulholland used to say every story has two beginnings. The first is page one—the place where you actually begin the story—but the second beginning comes later, the inciting incident.

No Ordinary Dog: My Partner from the SEAL Teams to the Bin Laden Raid by Will Chesney with Joe Layden

I didn’t know much about the world of military dogs. This is a nice, easy read on the dog — and human — who served on the SEAL team that took down bin Laden.

Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult by Ellen Huet

Well written deep dive into the orgasmic meditation wave that took San Francisco by storm a decade ago.

The Mind Reels by Fredrik deBoer

I read everything Freddie writes. This first novel of his is a compelling look at the experience of having a mental illness.

Flesh: A Novel by David Szalay

Booker-prize winning novel that’s quite engaging all the way through. Taut prose.

Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood by Michael Lewis

A refreshingly cyncial / realistic account of fatherhood from a master of the writing craft.

“This wasn’t entirely true, but it’d pass cleanly through any polygraph.”

If you have a gift for frightening new parents, your fortune in this world is secure. New parents are not rational; they worry about all sorts of things that it makes no sense to worry about.

After every new child, I learn the same lesson, grudgingly: If you want to feel the way you’re meant to feel about the new baby, you need to do the grunt work. It’s only in caring for a thing that you become attached to it.

Books, books, books.

The Money Trap: Lost Illusions Inside the Tech Bubble by Alok Sama

Fun stories from the Softbank era from a Softbank insider. Masa is such a fascinating character.

All Fours by Miranda July

The book causing women everywhere to divorce their husbands. It’s a compelling quasi-erotic romp through the mind of a mid-life woman rediscovering her sexuality.

But how skilled was he? An overly skilled lover was kind of icky—desire should make you clumsy. I always imagined us tripping all over ourselves with hunger. …

“Everyone thinks doggy style is so vulnerable,” Jordi said, “but it’s actually the most stable position. Like a table. It’s hard to be knocked down when you’re on all fours.” …

My friends are always obliging me with ephemera like this—screenshots of sexts, emails to their mothers—because I’m forever wanting to know what it feels like to be other people. What were we all doing? What the hell was going on here on Earth? Of course none of these artifacts really amounted to anything; it was like trying to grab smoke by its handle. What handle?

Mouth to Mouth: A Novel by Antoine Wilson

A fun novel about a oceanside rescue of an art dealer. The lives of rescuer and art dealer and others intertwine in compelling ways.

Read, Write, Own by Chris Dixon

A terrific argument for the power and potential of blockchain networks. Chris lays out the case for why we should not celebrate big tech’s control of our communication and social network platforms (Fb, Google, Apple, MSFT, etc). At this point, only email has open protocols free of any one big tech provider. Some excerpts (out of order):

What if you couldn’t resell or reinvest in your house or car? Or what if you had to change your name wherever you went? This is the digital world of corporate networks. ….

Think about it in terms of the infrastructure of a city, an analogy to which I’ll continually return. Roads should perform basic functions, but you don’t need them to be hotbeds of innovation. There isn’t that much creativity required; they just need to convey cars. On the other hand, you do want lots of creative entrepreneurs building around the roads: creating new shops and restaurants, constructing new buildings, expanding neighborhoods, and so forth. Roads should be thin, and their surroundings should be thick. …

Cost savings are nice, but wouldn’t it be nicer if companies let users, not just shareholders, participate in their financial success? The market cap of Big Tech companies totals in the trillions of dollars. Users, especially early ones, contribute much to this success. They sell products on Amazon, publish videos on YouTube, share content on Twitter, and so on. Users make early bets, just as founders and investors do. And yet in most corporate networks, users are treated as second-class citizens at best, or as a product to be served up to real customers, like advertisers, at worst. …

The design of the dominant social networks explains what went wrong. Powerful network effects locked users into Big Tech’s clutches, and that lock-in led to high take rates. It’s hard to know precisely what take rates many major corporate networks charge, because their terms can be opaque and noncommittal, but it’s reasonable to estimate they charge around 99 percent. …

The corporate model is like a highly managed theme park that builds the whole experience end to end. The blockchain network is like a city that starts with core building blocks and encourages bottom-up entrepreneurship.

The Decadent Society by Ross Douthat

I try not to miss anything Ross writes.

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

Wonderful plot. One sentence: “Outside, the snow kept on falling. She took off her coat, lit a fire in the kitchen, and made herself small before it.”

The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership by Bill Walsh, Steve Jamison, and Craig Walsh

I didn’t get a lot out of this book. There were some good sentences, though, on the costs of intensity:

When I give a speech at a corporate event, I often ask those in attendance, “Do you know how to tell if you’re doing the job?” As heads start whispering back and forth, I provide these clues: “If you’re up at 3 A.M. every night talking into a tape recorder and writing notes on scraps of paper, have a knot in your stomach and a rash on your skin, are losing sleep and losing touch with your wife and kids, have no appetite or sense of humor, and feel that everything might turn out wrong, then you’re probably doing the job.” This always gets a laugh, but not a very big one. Those executives in the audience recognize there is a significant price to pay to be the best. That price is not something they laugh at.

Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service by Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis is one of the GOATs but I didn’t find much that was gripping here. Lewis’s premise that government workers are deeply under appreciated is an extraordinary claim.

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.”