Sublime

6. The, You Know, Encroaching Darkness

I wanted to rubberneck her whole life.

May 1986, age nineteen Everyone’s a critic here, and the critics are always, always winning.

She is slow, and un-daring, and uptight. She is maybe a little boring. She doesn’t need to prove anything; she is exactly what she is through and through.

Reading is an unambiguously good thing in a life that’s been filled with mixed blessings.

Reading was my vocation, if a vocation is what you do when you are left entirely to your own devices.

Not by referring to authority, but by referring to my own subjective responses.

Doris Lessing, who made me think in uncomfortably explicit ways about girls and freedom,

October 12, 1990, age twenty-three I don’t think I’m built to last.