Sublime

Although I didn’t want to be admired only for my body, I certainly wanted my body to be admired. Like all people, I wanted to be wanted. And it felt good to be wanted by the sort of people who had once made me feel ashamed.

“The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality.”

Among the most striking features of the “unisex” literature of self-improvement is the poverty of the solutions offered to women in their quests for self-made success.

For Sloane there had always been something mature about not drawing a severe line between genders and marking your predilections on either side.

William Maxwell says it somewhere in The Folded Leaf: that the teenager gets so brooding in his sexuality and self-sanctity that all he requires of others is their absence.

Dan Rocker’s hard-to-learn lesson—that no one really notices even eccentric behavior, that you can mostly follow your star, or your zipper, without raising the eyebrows or attention of the Others, who are following their own—was true here, as it is everywhere.

anthropomorphically.”

Mystery, he also had a reputation for befriending younger students just so they’d take him to parties. I invited Ross to his first event the following week. Monica, a struggling but well-connected actress I’d sarged, had invited me to her birthday party at Belly, a tapas bar on Santa Monica Boulevard. I thought it would be a good scene full of beau