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

Was it when you got fat, or bald, or got bad plastic surgery that couldn’t disguise the fact that you were fat and bald?

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

But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate? He couldn’t remember being a child and being able to define happiness: there was only misery, or fear, and the absence of misery or fear, and the latter state was all he had needed or wanted. “I think he’s shy,” he finished

posing girls and preening guys,

to Willem this line sounded a little too practiced, like he was rehearsing it, trying to perfect its careless, throwaway tone before he someday got to say it for real to an interviewer somewhere,

There, art was something that was just an accessory to a lifestyle. You painted or sculpted or made crappy installation pieces because it justified a wardrobe of washed-soft T-shirts and dirty jeans and a diet of ironic cheap American beers and ironic expensive hand-rolled American cigarettes. Here, however, you made art because it was the only thi

He had lost the ability to imagine anything.

he was the dumbest person in their class, admitted as a sort of unofficial poor-white-rural-dweller-oddity affirmative-action representative.)

he tried to prepare himself for disappointment, even as he yearned to be proven wrong.