A Little Life: The Million-Copy Bestseller (Picador Collection)

that brief moment of possessing both downtown credibility and the promise of more mainstream success.

which he finally finished with the unhappy certainty that he had gotten all of it wrong.

The camera wasn’t a great one, and it had hazed every picture with a smoky yellow light, which, along with his poor focusing skills, had made everyone warm and rich and slightly soft-edged, as if they had been shot through a tumblerful of whiskey.

Somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from being dignified to being a sign of your own cowardice.

Acting was like war, and they were veterans: they didn’t want to think about the war, and they certainly didn’t want to talk about it with naïfs who were still eagerly dashing toward the trenches,

while the others created, he copied:

father and a mother, presumably. Or, more realistically, simply a man and a woman.

he would be left alone to scan the arts section of the paper, and read about other people who were doing the kinds of things he didn’t even have the expansiveness, the arrogance of imagination to dream of, and in those hours the world would feel very large, and the lake very empty, and the night very black, and he would wish he were back in Wyoming

the sort who dressed and moved as if they were constantly being observed,