Stay True: A Memoir (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

It was only in my zine that I admitted to dreaming of anything great. In real life, I feared stepping into too large a world and failing. But I wrote things that were earnest and open, that I would never dare say out loud.

We seemed to spend hours apart, occasionally intersecting in some unlikely aisle. Everything seemed a possibility, a clue, an invitation to experience new, unprecedented emotional realities. We were enthralled by the same music, but it showed us different things.

Maybe those were the last days when something could be truly obscure. Not in the basic sense that a style or song might be esoteric. But there was a precariousness to out-of-the-way knowledge, a sense that a misfiled book or forgotten magazine could easily be lost forever. Learning about something a few minutes before everyone else converted to a k

Occasionally, I felt preemptively embarrassed about my private hysterics. I think the most depressing aspect of keeping a journal is thinking, or knowing, that one day I’ll be sitting somewhere reading this. Trying to relive some moments, but struck not by recaptured emotions, rather being struck by how damn deep I tried to sound at some point in t

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.

had never heard Mojave 3, but their songs were perfect, like witnessing something beautiful happening in slow motion. I aspired to move through the world this deliberately.

was responsible for my friends’ safety, and for their enrichment, too.

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.

You give expecting to receive. Yet we often give and receive according to intermittent, sometimes random intervals. That time lag is where a relationship emerges.