Conversations with Friends: A Novel

was appropriating my fear of total disappearance as a spiritual practice. I was inhabiting disappearance as something that could reveal and inform, rather than totalize and annihilate. A lot of the time my meditation was unsuccessful.

Not that God existed in any material way but as a shared cultural practice so widespread that it came to seem materially real, like language or gender.

Well, but what does it mean for a relationship to “work out?” he said. It was never going to be something conventional.

I could see I had entered a new social setting now, where severe mental illness no longer had unfashionable connotations. I was going through a second upbringing: learning a new set of assumptions, and feigning a greater level of understanding than I really possessed. By this logic Nick and Melissa were like my parents bringing me into the world, p

You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position.