The stress of this fraud makes her want to escape from reality, which prompts her to smoke marijuana, which makes her eat compulsively, which forces her to exercise obsessively and without reward, which makes her original dishonesty so shameful. But I am the only one who knows this. Only I see her secrets.

There’s a few lines where the singer mentions how the Beatles’ career is like a fairy tale, and that the trajectory of their fame and their impact on the world would seem completely implausible if it were presented in a fictional context. That was the part that made Valerie smile the most—the not-so-obvious idea that the Beatles were not imaginary.

Did I have a responsibility to this person? Jesus would say, “Yes.” Nietzsche would say, “Don’t ask a question when you already know the answer.” But let’s not get political.

experience, even when no one’s watching. And seeing someone humiliated is always going to make you like that person a little more. If an author wants to make a fictional character sympathetic, the easiest way to make that happen is to place them in a humiliating scenario. Humiliation preys on our deepest fears of what it means to be alive.

the TV, one of those variety shows—and it occurred to me that people who don’t talk about themselves are limiting their own potential. They think they’re guarding themselves from some sort of abstract danger, but they’re actually allowing other people to decide who they are and what they’re like.

What I came to realize is that people need their actions to be scrutinized and interpreted in order to feel like what they’re doing matters. Singular, solitary moments are like television pilots that never get aired. They don’t count. This, I think, explains the fundamental urge to get married and have kids, or even just the need to feel popular

Our world is really backward, Victoria. It’s backward. Look what society does. It takes the handful of people who know how to succeed and makes them feel terrible for being different. Everyone is supposed to be mediocre, I guess.

You enter therapy in order to confront four-word sentences: Why am I here? Where am I going? What does it mean?

We always end up being ourselves, somehow. I was who I was long before I consciously became the person I am. Being unseen makes me feel different than other people, but I’ve always felt different than other people. Invisibility isn’t the issue. The difference is that I’ve always possessed the single-minded dedication to make an impossible scenario