Stay True: A Memoir (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

We were in new cities, losing ourselves to new excesses, finding our way to higher rooftops, seeing a different shade of sunrise. But we were escaping different things.

Like many immigrants who prized education, my parents retained faith in the mastery of technical fields, like the sciences, where answers weren’t left to interpretation. You couldn’t discriminate against the right answer. But I preferred to spend my time interpreting things.

History is a tale we tell, not a perfect account of reality, I continued. You just have to figure out whether you trust the storyteller.

The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories.

Out of principle, I stopped reading fiction. I wanted to learn only about histories that had been denied to us.

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.

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.

I didn’t want to die, even though I was increasingly curious about its logistics.

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.