Conversations with Friends: A Novel

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

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.

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

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.

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