As a reader, I am always diffusing into the world of fiction. As a writer, I cannot solidify into direct statements. As a person, I cannot solidify into someone who makes anything happen. In my most lost moments, I see myself disintegrating and drifting into everything and everyone else, floating unseen and dispersed through the world the way I

I thought about my old feeling of too-muchness, and what it would mean to surrender to that "softness and permeability" that Ehrenreich describes. To be permeable to the tides of story and history, to let everything that feels like too much flow freely through the mind and body. This is the way to live joyfully and defiantly, whether in politics or

I didn't go to books to be a heroine. I went to books because I wanted to be—nothing, nobody. I wanted nothing so much as to be a kind of sociable air, circulating invisibly in the room, necessary but never noticed,

For most of my life, I believed that this atomized, powerfully powerless tranquility was the ideal state.

“To read oneself into another person's tale is the opposite of how and why I read. To read is to be with people who, unlike those around one, do not notice one's existence."

It was like this passage opened an unnoticed door into a new chamber of my heart, or my brain, or a shortcut between the two. I didn't know if it had just appeared, or if it had always been there, a primordial part of my being. Suddenly it was clear to me that books did not work on everyone the way they worked on me, on Roland, on A. S. Byatt. I

I was afraid I wouldn’t pass the test.

I liked how the books and their world existed so wholly without me. I liked being able to be in it without having to hide from its gaze. I was not accustomed to sitting comfortably in rooms full of people, and there was something so new and pleasant about being a secret but welcome observer in the busy world of the book.

To live like this in books

This, like many of my anxieties, is both literal and literary. While the fear of death-by-shelf is a very real,