Lately time has been moving too fast. The places I used to frequent are all closed, my brother grows a head taller every time I see him, all my friends are moving away, doors and empty apartments spinning in their wake. The map of my life is getting larger, choices feel weightier. All the things I vowed to love forever have changed, and I’m

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But the midwestern town was depicted somewhat differently. It was an “inheritor of values of a mythological founding generation” and a “battleground for the characteristics and actualization of those values,” with the result that it “became the center of a conflict about the future of the country itself.”

It suggests something about the hollowing out of the American economy that, by the 1990s, even those living in actual cities had begun to make the story of the town we must leave behind their own. If you feel stifled by Chicago, that’s your fault.