Real Americans: A novel

Was it inherited, their compulsion? This shared need to be productive, to do good, to right some wrong? He wanted his life to mean something; he had yet to prove it.

This was what love had always been for me: denying your own reality in order to protect another person.

As a parent, she had sought to do the opposite of what her mother had done—not expecting Nick to resemble her, not burdening him with her expectations. And yet was she any different? Could love between a mother and child be anything less than completely overwhelming?

The thoughtless destruction that had happened, in those years, the erasing of who we had been. As though without a past we’d be unburdened, when in fact the opposite was true: In trying to leave the past behind, like a shadow, it followed you.

You envied what you felt was possible.

As people we interrupted one another’s lives—that was what we did. If you sought to live your life without interruption you wound up like me: living life without interruption, totally alone.

This was amusing to me, that writing about being drunk counted as literature.

It was only after seeing the trees here, I realized, that I could describe what home was like.

territory was being encroached upon. “Even eye color?” Rich’s eyes widened. “Boring,” Levi said. “Eye color, hair color, height, gender—those