Novels, suicide notes and memoirs all have one thing in common: they’re all fictions. Novels, obviously. Memoirs, while promising the truth of a life, are still inherently fictional by virtue of what’s excluded and what’s amplified. Memoirs are the manipulative presentation of one’s life for public consumption. The mundane and the embarrassing are

It occurred to me that there was in fact no magazine, overt or hidden, that would not make sense in the waiting room of a psychotherapist. The

He sat at his desk. I sat in the chair, which supported my thoracic and lumbar spine in ways I hadn’t previously known possible. I could see this relationship having legs.

The door opened and a woman in her late forties came out. She had permed hair, a linen jacket, printed skirt; her eyes were puffy and swollen from crying. So, it’s one of these offices, I thought. An office without a secondary exit. I liked secondary exits. The suffering needn’t meet the suffering in the anteroom of suffering.

Sex requires someone else, usually. Drugs are for being alone. People who like to get fucked up with other people are not people I like to get fucked up with. Because getting fucked up is for doing alone. Or, very rarely, with someone who is likeminded and handles their drugs well; who doesn’t talk too much and will let you rest your legs on their

My small group of friends were all similarly anti-social, autodidactic, talented, and at war with the permanence of their bodies. It was a good time.

Danny had a parrot named Fucker. And besides dealers and hookers, Danny only had two visitors to his house—his mother and his parole officer. The parrot didn’t have many words or sentences to blurt out, because neither did Danny. So his parole officer would drop in, or his mother might bring him a casserole, and Fucker would say one of two things:

I’m forty years old as I write this. And what I’ve learned, if I’ve learned anything at all, is that you need to reconcile living with your insatiable hole. You don’t have to love it, but you need to accept it. I’ve come to accept that I’m a fundamentally incomplete creature. Parts of me are missing. I can’t reassemble myself, as much as I’ve tried

In the end, I only believe in Siddhartha Gautama and Bertrand Russell. And although I’ve published many things indicating otherwise, I believe the only truly original artists of the last one hundred odd years are Vladimir Nabokov and Patricia Highsmith.