Sublime

It is my blessing and my curse to professionalize every single enthusiasm that floats through my distractible head. It’s this way for many journalists—you become fascinated by a subject, and then you kill the thing you love by turning it into your job.

A lonely girl living in a world surrounded only by ghosts. Nothing reminded her of her own life more.

The sometimes-truth is that we are interested in and, yes, even attracted to bad people.

“Sometimes life is a thing of determination,” I wrote in my diary that first winter when I returned to school. “And when you are determined, you are free.” Too right, mate. I looked like a bigger fuckup than ever: the heavy blackout drinking, the promiscuity, the mad butter eating. But my life had become a thing of determination, and so it came to

He became his own fame, a fame that was interwoven with his masculinity. He became a human synecdoche for the condition of literary virility.

she “lives at a rate and intensity and with a reality that makes other lives seem pale, thin and shadowy.”

At my high school and all through my first year of Oberlin, I’d been taught to read for meaning and subtext and symbol. I was good at it. I read with a facile “I solved it!” seriousness. I didn’t know it but I was a product of the New School criticism that still ruled English departments at that time. Somehow along the way, I’d forgotten how to rea

Everyone who was a girl in the 1970s knows this feeling: running your hand along the spines of biographies in the school library, looking for any title at all about a woman, and winding up reading about…Clara Barton? Fine, okay, Clara Barton. If that’s all there is.

too many feelings.