Yet I remain gripped by silence, the kind that renders you discontinuous, cleaved in two. I felt incapable of synthesizing old memories, new experiences, and current events into anything formal, whole, comprehensible. Call it a failure of narrative memory. It is January, I thought, so I am allowed to be dramatic.

If you have ever been a lonely child, part of you stays her forever. A void opens up inside you when you are very small and then mocks you all your life for being unable to fill it.

I thought that everyone lived that way, not on this surface layer, but in the reconstituted history of the moments we pass through.

Total Girl—that is, to consider the girl as a specific technology of subjectivity that maxes out on desire, attraction, replication, and cunning to achieve specific ends—and to use such technology to access something once unknowable about ourselves rather than for simple capital gains, blowing a kiss at individually-scaled pleasures while really giving voice to the egregore, the totality of not just information, but experience, affect, emotion.

The Total Girl’s Guide to Survival would include: how to perfect your exterior representation and diffuse it until it’s everywhere, and until you can live well inside the space shielded by your own image; how to take pleasure in the image, in the content, while unhooking its power over life; and how to be realistic about illusion so that you can license the Real to take root beyond its purview, in its lee.

To survive and thrive, the girl encodes language, invents behavior, manipulates social codes, and, most importantly, shares and intuits this information.

A girlblogger is a girl who blogs about being a girl, a girl’s girl, a girly girl who looks like she dances ballet, weighs little, wears lip products from Dior, and is tightly wound but loosely tied together with silk ribbon.

A girlblogger’s frequent lines of text rub together into an inner monologue that looms over all her posts, even the most silent and glassy-eyed (like a stuffed white rabbit).

All while she was working, raising herself, clawing up the cliff-face of adulthood.

that we live in a world in which our power has a different shape from that of men, a different distribution of advantage, ours a funnel and theirs an expanding cone.

They drink the tap water of the zeitgeist to get a sense of how to respond.

The girlblogger is a Zoomer, who is keenly aware of the performance, the aesthetics of writing. She is made up of surfaces, her identity a collage of resonant images and quotations.

how these feelings rarely penetrated through to the prose.

This is, above all, the writing of someone who is being watched: someone who knows exactly what they are sending out, and who is receiving it.

These goddesses were psychic chiaroscuros: powerful and wounded, their blood running hot with ambition, animated by dark attachments and shameless hungers.

but some part of me was already chasing the false gods she spoke for: beauty as a kind of spiritual guarantor, writing blank checks for my destiny; the self-effacing ease afforded by wealth and whiteness; selfhood as triumphant brand consistency, the erasure of opacity and self-destructive tendency.

I found a surrogate to embody the same fraught double helix of adoration and resentment

It wrote, for instance, that generative A.I. “asks whether the meaning of language is still rooted in the human experience, or whether it is a commodity to be mined and manipulated, a tool to be used in whatever way the artificers of this new technology choose.”

Fear loves to embellish itself, to embroider mini world-prisons for our protection. And I wonder, how do we slough off the thick, calcified fictions we’ve told ourselves about who we’re supposed to be, to uncover what we already are.

not the major devastations but the strange little ache that feels like a precondition to being human. No amount of Transcendental Meditation, Pilates, turmeric, rose quartz, direct sunlight, jogging, oat milk, sleep hygiene, or psychoanalysis can fully alleviate that ambient sadness. Part of it is surely existential—our lives are temporary and inscrutable; death is compulsory and forever—but another part feels more quotidian and incremental, the slow accumulation of ordinary losses.

I should be better than this by now. I’m not supposed to want this kind of stuff anymore. I’m supposed to be past it; I’m trying to live up in the light. It’s true that pain polishes the edges of the streets and the subway stations, and makes their colors and angles sing. Feeling broken-hearted is a way to feel young again, sometimes, and sometimes sorrow can light up every avenue that stretches downtown toward a vanishing point.

That’s the problem with love; you make something a part of your life, and then it becomes about you, telling your own stories back to yourself, conscripted into the cast of your movie. Love something long enough and it becomes your archive, a closet full of hooks on which to hang memories. I love the National’s music because of the music, but I also love it because it's the house where I grew up.

I burrow into its layers and make a home, and then one day it’s gone. It still exists, but most things still exist after they’re gone; the form in which it exists now neither includes me nor moves me, so I go looking for the next new place. I summon up the desire for the new, now that the familiar is no longer on offer. I convince myself that novelty is what I was seeking all along.

Online had seeped into my real-time emotional life; it was like realizing you’re fluent in a language when you wake up from a dream in which you were speaking it.

No one prepared me for the heartbreak of losing my first language. It doesn’t feel like the sudden, sharp pain of losing someone you love, but rather a dull ache that builds slowly until it becomes a part of you.

It’s the analgesic drip of service and certitude: the oil greasing the gears, not the gears themselves.

This psychic material, “unalterable by time,” was fated to return, and to work its poison on our lives.

writing about your love—committing it to paper, where it becomes something that other people see, as opposed to something that you feel—makes it generic, interchangeable.

Your job is not to lock the doors and chisel at yourself like a marble statue in the darkness until you feel quantifiably worthy of the world outside. Your job, really, is to find people who love you for reasons you hardly understand, and to love them back, and to try as hard as you can to make it all easier for each other.

It’s hard, certainly — it’s painful and exhausting and fundamentally terrifying to rip yourself open and leave the guts at the mercy of the people you choose to love. But if I know anything, I know this: It’s better than being alone.

But this is precisely why food matters so much to the mixed Asian: It places the desire for culture inside the body, out of the reach of any potential accusation that she is, as it were, appropriating herself.

This creature is beautiful and terrible, striated with desires that feel hard or wrong to name, a literal assimilation of culture, custom, and language, not to mention skin, fat, and bone.

I found myself unable to re-enter the story. There was too much scar tissue.

it makes you feel like you’re in a Hopper painting, as though having a bad time might be luminous as the late-night lonely glow of oil on canvas.

We all live in a place that someone else is passing through to get somewhere else; to the passenger in a moving car, each of our lives—our homes, our doorsteps, our windows, whatever we break ourselves in half trying to keep hold of—is the unreal blur between one end of the map’s route and the other. My life, which seems so ruinously important to me, is just a thing that the google maps lady in someone else’s car talks them past on their way somewhere else, left turn in 400 feet.

the moral valence seems to flip, from a didactic invitation to enjoy this carnival of comeuppance to pious scolding: Be careful what you wish for.

why on earth did I watch this happen to everyone else over and over again, and never think that it would happen to me? They’re fixing the facade, so they put up scaffolding.

The scaffolding wants to make sure I know that no one ever arrives at a fixed point, and that eventually we all decay, and break down, and need to be repaired.

There is not one thing in the world that you can love enough to hold it fixed forever in the form in which you first loved it.

Great cinema has that same shimmer and force that great poetry does, that thing that lives in the gaps and the silences. It is this more than anything that cinematic fiction achieves. The power of negative capability. That multiplicity of things achieved through compression and condensation of image and heat and light and sensation.

The work of change, like the rest of the work of living, is rarely spectacular. Like love, the trick of it is not how to do it once, but how to make it consistent over time.

The sky gets lighter a little bit sooner each day; technicolor leaks into the world in the smallest possible fractions. I do the same things again and again until they make a life. Everything I love has already grown boring and familiar, until it isn’t, until it is again.

It performs a Fourier Transform on the apparent noise of life and decomposes it into neat categories that we can then use to retrofit a personality or archetype.

You are caught in a mimetic cage of your own making. You are the one with the keys.

inventing elaborate scenarios featuring myself as an adult, specifically an adult 24 years old, an age on which I settled because my mother had assured me that 24 was the best, her favorite year.

One direction is outward or centrifugal, in which we keep going outside our reading, from the individual words to the things they mean, or, in practice, to our memory of the con­ventional association between them. The other direction is inward or centripetal, in which we try to develop from the words a sense of the larger verbal pattern they make.

Maybe hoarding these things makes molting easier, a way of holding onto my past selves. Maybe I will find my way back to them in new ways.

We live in an America of endless stories about who we are supposed to be, about whose stories matter, about whose reality is real. We live in a ghost country where the stories we are told often aim to limit the ways we can retell ourselves, to silence the difference of difference.

The sequence is at once a terrifying vision and a harrowing memory; never revisited, it forms an invisible spine that connects the series’ two arcs like ribs, curving out and around without touching.

genre chirality—two genres like two hands, mirroring each other but not superimposable

the trauma plot transcends genre. It bites into the diasporic epic, the novel of manners, the uplifting sports comedy. It gnaws character down to the bone of backstory.

a coming-of-age story that proposes an identity can be created through the careful curation of the galaxy of cultural artifacts swirling around the average American teenager.

You have worlds inside you — swirling, colorful, mournful, generous, soaring, hopeful, searing, heartbreaking worlds. You cannot offer just a tiny slice of you. You cannot hold back the flood.

he wanted us to strive beyond what we could articulate. That true fiction, real fiction, masterful fiction existed outside of the realm of the articulable. You were really writing when you struggled at every turn to find the words for it was you wanted to express.

Perhaps a narrative is really just a framework we apply to the shaggy raw material of life. Perhaps narrative is always extrinsic to experience. Curious because we always have this sense that we are excavating the narrative from our raw substrate when in fact we are the ones supplying the narrative in the first place.

They are cold, piercing. Their insight comes indirectly out of a system of images arranged with the permanence of rock formations. She is not blasting her way to meaning so much as waiting patiently for it to arrive through the careful and close observation of a world already in progress around us.

The gothic is also inherently about the past. About history and its wounds. Where the sentimental is only ever contemporary, subject to whims and taste.

I don’t know, I found it really affecting, but perhaps that is because I am so poisoned by the late capitalist alienation that has become the default aesthetic and emotional framework of contemporary life. Also because no one hugged me as a child.

Living is a process of temporary fixes, strung together to make a rickety bridge, with wide spaces where planks are missing and a long windy drop below.

A midlife crisis is what it looks like when a person in non-fictional reality attempts time travel.

Everything Everywhere knows that science fiction is about longing, that stories about magic are about the times when we do not know how to fix it, and that alternate timelines are a way to talk about what it feels like to get older without having done all the things we meant to do when we were young.

Fandom originates, at least in part, as a response to the relative powerlessness of the consumer in relation to powerful institutions of cultural production and circulation.

We must do as all great fiction demands and select. Embody. Modulate physic distance. Eschew the narrated for the experiential. We must bring our characters close. And we must stay when they grow cold and uncomfortable. When the world demands of them a pound of flesh, we must watch them carve it from the fat of their thigh and offer it. We must witness them. Not look away. Not retreat into interiority or backstory. We must pay attention. We must observe. We must look. Not with our literal sense of sight. But with all the feeling and sensitivity that comes to us as writers, as fellow people. We must see not with our eyes, but with that delicate, shivering sense organ of the inner eye, the imagination.

we instead get realism, which manifests as arrested development, a bildungsroman where no one becomes anything, least of all the thing you went to school for in the first place.

Today, the student-loan crisis is producing a similar effect: a stymied bildungsroman for a generation who have been robbed of the possibility of becoming, sold a story that would cost them everything.

I’ve started to think of it as a Pecknoldian paradox: human relationships last only in our telling of them, and memory is what grants them meaning. Memory is all that we have amid the inconstancy of the human heart—and eventually that, too, will fail us when we need it most. We are alone.

A ghost town is a place where the past never recedes, where we are always living in our own stories, dragging our memories around behind us, making a horrible scraping sound across the floor in the middle of the night.

All we have are ghost towns; that’s what societies are. We live soaked in the sins and the compromises of the people who made our places, walking thin sidewalks over the piled-up bodies below. After Halloween the end of the year crashes in, the cold-weather a reminder that nothing endures, that everything becomes ghosts.

The ghost of the old year, of the old story, runs right underneath this one, following us incorporeal from room to room and from day to day.

Halloween is a night about living within our fears, not just fears of ghosts and monsters, but the fear of what happens if we admit we want praise, or desire, or attention, or love. Our own desires are always a haunted house, and often the big monster at the center is the desire to be desired, to be noticed, to be found funny, to be loved.

Halloween’s permissions depend on being temporary, on how the night passes quickly and erases itself as it goes. You go into the haunted house, and ask for everything you want. You get up close with the monsters, and then you leave. If you want to, you can pretend it never happened.

Halloween is a holiday about admitting that we want things. It’s a festival about desire and desperation, grabbing handfuls of candy out of the bowl.

What we find sexy—just like what we find funny, or what we find scary— is an origin story, a way of stating who we are and what space we occupy in the world, a thing that connects us to others.

It felt like Halloween because we dressed up, and because we made fools of ourselves, because we allowed ourselves to ask for the things we wanted, and maybe get them.

I suppose that’s why so many people are terrified by interiority. The idea that they could know what another person is thinking and to put those thoughts in words.

Every place we love is a fiction, and so is every story we come up with about why we love it, or why we’re there, or what the city made possible, and what it gave us.

an infinitesimal fraction of this motley corpus, point toward just how much feeling there is and will always be out there—how much longing, how much regret, how much love that, like the Internet itself, haunts our collective reality even when it can’t be seen.

but it strikes me as a remarkably defeating final blow that when we are hurt, we not only hold the burden of proof to the outside world — we hold it, quietly and intimately, against ourselves.

As long as people are drawn to the disembodied girl in the machine

This is, I suppose, the process of nostalgia: turning your house into someone else’s house, turning your memories into someone else’s memories, turning yourself into a character in a story. Fictional memory pumps invisible fake air in the room until all of the sweat dries and every surface is cool to the touch.

i wonder what romantic love would feel like if i’d never seen a romantic comedy, if i’d been allowed to figure it out before a commodified version was fed to me.

try as i might, i can only seem to understand myself through the fictions of the more actualized — and, just as i reassure myself that i am drawn to this media because of some predetermined, inherent sense of self, i wonder if it is creating me, too. who would i be if i stopped consuming things? what would there be left to feel?

i am in my hysterical 20th-century woman era, i would think, unlikeably. i am sleeping at erratic hours, i am sobbing, i am writing and never publishing

even when i am ostensibly at my lowest, i am still filtering my experiences through the eyes of a consumer; the desire to editorialize our own experiences (to romanticize the unseen, to live for our biographies) has become an autonomic facet of womanhood as unavoidable as breathing.

like the great mad women before me, i am spiralling into manic-depressive chaos in a way that i will inevitably romanticize regardless of its material consequences, and self-mythologizing until i can make that feel like a good thing.

Everything is new which means nothing is new; even the new things already feel used up,. Everything is so ripe it dissolves in your hands, the juice running down your arm.

romantics with a pragmatic streak. INTJs.

Little Dog’s relationship with his mother is his life’s codex: everything that structures his world—work, gratitude, cruelty, poverty, history—is translated through her.

The structural hallmarks of Vuong’s poetry—his skill with elision, juxtaposition, and sequencing—shape the novel, too, and they work on overlapping scales: passages are organized by recurring phrases, as are the chapters, which build momentum as a poetry collection does, line by line.

beyond the place where things are named and then stay in the shape of that name. Containers do not successfully hold their contents here; we are always spilling over, refusing borders, refusing definitions.

Love is unknowable, and embarrassing, and stupid, and sometimes it’s nothing—putting all the fanciest vocabulary words you know up against a feeling in your stomach.

Love is impossible, but that means it is a place where there are no borders between worthy and unworthy, where there is no notion of worthiness at all. The harsh lines do not hold; they blur out into the green haze beyond the legible view.

Sometimes, out of nowhere, something happens. Sometimes, against all the odds, we manage to stay. Each day we wake up again and choose to live into the world no matter how much it has hurt us, hope pulling off a dark-horse long-shot win against experience.

To write about something is to try to capture it in a still form, define a shape and make it knowable within that outline. Here is what we are, and here is what we aren’t. Here is where we stop, and here is where we begin.

So much of the art we love is really just about our loyalty to and softness toward our own memories; so often loving an album or a book or a song is really just a way to love an obsolete version of ourselves.

I love New York, but sometimes I’m sorry that the most fertile roots I’ve laid in my adult life are in such a transient place, so far from my family, so expensive, so chaotic. To leave now sounds lonelier than if I’d never come. But I don’t regret it either, it’s just how my life unfolded.

fold your paper-thin feelings into mine, crease the edges, press, and tuck away this raw, numb flatness: shape it into a colorful origami crane and throw it out your bedroom window. shred it. i don’t care. there are no rules.

History wasn’t just a list of causes and effects, credits and debts; it was a flow of intersecting domino rows running around the globe. Everybody’s past was implicated.

a particle is a thing in itself. a wave is a disturbance in something else. waves themselves are probably not disturbed.

we’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense;