Altogether, denarrative desire is basically the idea that sometimes, when you reach the end of a book, all you want to do is turn back to the first page and read it over again—but differently.

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

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

In response to these fantasies, my eczema, which had disfigured my fingers when I was a small child to the point that I had to wear vaselined vinyl gloves to school, returned with vigor, so that my hands looked the way I imagined my whole body might, the skin filled with tiny bubbles of fluid that would burst and crack.

This happens a lot, that feeling when I can’t remember if I thought a thought or if a book planted it in my brain, and it’s just now popped up from wherever it was hiding. Part of my fate as a greedy, acquisitive reader is that I can never escape the overbearing presence of books, whether in the mind or on the shelf. I wonder if, without them, I’d

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,

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

I wish that I’d had access when I was younger to a book like George Scialabba’s How to Be Depressed, which gives a mercifully matter-of-fact explanation of what depression is, one that I would have recognized immediately as my own experience and found helpful, perhaps even as a child: “We are all issued neurological shock absorbers, usually good

I was afraid I wouldn’t pass the test.