Stay True: A Memoir (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

The intimacy of friendship, he wrote, lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another.

The allure all these years had been the possibility of the asymptote’s line one day meeting the curve. At first this realization that I could never force a connection seemed tragic; then it became comforting to imagine that the line and the curve could go on forever. They move in the same direction, even if they never touch.

But I saw coolness as a quality primarily expressed through erudite discernment, and I defined who I was by what I rejected, a kitchen-sink approach to negation

What was that thing we had learned in our rhetoric class, about Derrida’s “deferral of meaning” and how words are merely signs that can never fully summon what they mean? Yet words are all we have, simultaneously bringing us closer, casting us farther away.

When you’re young, you do so many things hoping to be noticed. The way you dress or stand, the music played loud enough to catch the attention of another person who might know a song, too. And then there are things you do as you step out into the world, the real world full of strange adults, testing out what it means to be generous or thoughtful. I

Your obligation isn’t just to repay the gift according to a one-to-one ratio. You’re beholden to the “spirit of the gift,” a kind of shared faith. Every gesture carries a desire for connection, expanding one’s ring of associations.

thought I had a lot to say, but I felt timid about saying it. Making my zine was a way of sketching the outlines of a new self, writing a new personality into being.

Suburbs are about the leisurely conquest of space, an alternative to the uncomfortable density of the city. They seem to run free from history itself, offering a sense that nothing was there before. But the illusion of tranquility frays at the edges: the neurosis required to maintain so neatly manicured a lawn, the pristine sidewalks that nobody wa

The true account would necessarily be joyful, rather than morose, and surrendering to joy wouldn’t mean I was abandoning you. A celebration of how it began, rather than a chronicle of free fall, a tribute to that first sip, rather than all the spinning rooms that followed. It would be an account of love and duty, not just anger and hatred, and it w

It was hard to unlearn the usefulness of dichotomies. They made the world so much cleaner. I had defined myself by what I rejected, and these choices often hardened into something that felt political. It was about your sense of the world and what you expected from it.