Stay True: A Memoir (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

We craved new contexts, initiating routines that might eventually feel second nature.

I felt this aching nostalgia for things that happened just hours earlier and wrote them down as a historian might describe a centuries-past crossroads.

But I was stridently noncommittal to them. I always left myself an out, an escape hatch in case someone offered me a new adventure, the adventure I thought I deserved. I looked forward to a time when I would be the finished article, my sense of the world innate and effortless, with no evidence that there had been any rough drafts.

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.

I finally felt in my body how music worked. A chorus of nonbelievers, channeling God. A harmonic coming together capable of overtaking lyrics about drift and catastrophe, a song as proof that people can work together.

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.

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

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.

We could seek nuance and refine our political positions forever. How would we dream together if we couldn’t agree on any common values?

I’d heard these songs hundreds of times before. But to listen to them with other people: it was what I’d been waiting for.