Stay True: A Memoir (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

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

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.

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

We would have continued living, reminded of each other when a song came on during a movie, or on the radio, or whatever unforeseeable technology delivered us beauty.

I was always thinking about the past, pursuing other people’s memories and dashed dreams. The aspect of my course work I loved was the archival research, snooping through boxes of old files, looking for ways to access some deeper understanding of someone’s art. I was fascinated by the kinds of stories you could tell with the things someone left beh

wanted to impose structure on all that had come before that July night, turning the past into something architectural, a palace of memories to wander at my own leisure.

Knowledge might not set you free or light your path. It could become a kind of cage.

Once, harmony suggested the possibility of sublime order, of resolutions so eternal and true that we wouldn’t merely recognize beauty; we would feel it vibrating through our bodies. Now it just made me feel sick.

It was the kind of scene I had wanted to see for months, a clue that beauty was still possible. Maybe it was nothing more than shifting cloud patterns. But I saw it.