Svetlana didn’t seem to have enjoyed family life more than I had, but in her case it had made her want to have a do-over, to do well herself all the things that her parents had done badly. I, on the other hand, thought that my parents had been doomed; I didn’t see how I could do any better than they had.

treated the actual as limiting proof of the possible! I felt that this was what I was fighting against, and always had been: the tyranny of the particular, arbitrary way that things happened to have turned out.

Yet there was a compulsion to describe it: the same compulsion clearly felt by many people to write vivid descriptions of things in their grandparents’ houses. If I had to read about one more person’s grandmother’s sofa, about how it smelled like cough drops . . .

We had been listening to “Criminal” by Fiona Apple: Riley’s favorite song.

Whatever problems I had were of my own making—and that meant I was going to have to solve them myself.

Why were poems so expensive, when they had so few words?

I immediately recognized it as an old song—the kind you heard as a kid, and knew that the world it came from and referred to was not only closed to you, but was one that in some sense you yourself had brought to an end, so that whatever it was really about was something that no longer existed, and that you could never have—except that now you were

Well, that’s just it, I thought: you didn’t just write down a raw cry of suffering. It would be boring and self-indulgent. You had to disguise it, turn it into art. That’s what literature was. That was what required talent, and made people want to read what you wrote, and then they would give you money.

The one that started “Days like this, I don’t know what to do with myself” made me feel certain that I had spent my whole life not knowing what to do with myself—all day, and all night.