I’m looking for, the more I feel that I’m too far gone. I can feel the low, uneasy hum of self-delusion whenever I think about all of this—a tone that gets louder the more I try to write and cancel it out. I can feel the tug of my deep and recurring suspicion that anything I might think about myself must be, somehow, necessarily wrong.
In the end, the safest conclusions may not actually be conclusions. We are asked to understand our lives under such impossibly convoluted conditions. I have always accommodated everything I wish I were opposed to. Here, as in so many other things, the “thee” that I dread may have been the “I” all along.
For my parents
Acknowledgments
Though all of these essays were written for this book, several of them influenced my work at The New Yorker, and vice versa. A few of them build on things I wrote at Jezebel and The Hairpin. I am thankful to have started writing inside the Awl family: thank you to Logan Sachon and Mike Dang, the first editors to publish me; to Jane Marie, my dreamy first Hairpin editor; to Choire Sicha and Alex Balk, who used to confuse me when they would bitch about the internet—lol.
I’m thankful to the Repentagon for the lasting education, and for the friends, too—Lauren, Rachel, Annabel, Lara, thanks for seeing it all. Robert, I’m as glad for you now as I was when we saw the construction angels.
At my beloved University of Virginia: thank you to the Jefferson Scholars Foundation for the lifetime of student debt freedom, to Michael Joseph Smith, to Caroline Rody, to Walt Hunter, to Rachel Gendreau. Kevin, Jamie, Ryan, Tory, Baxa, Juli, and Buster Baxter: thank you for the permanent spiritual home.
It was during my short time in the Peace Corps that I started considering the unlikely possibility of writing for a living. Lola, Yan, Kyle, thank you for letting me cry when my laptop was stolen, and Akash, thank you forever for lending me yours so that I could start writing again. David, you’re the best kuya. Dinara Sultanova, you’re the most wonderful woman I’ve ever met.
I owe so much to the funding and space provided by the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Thank you to Nicholas Delbanco for encouraging me immediately, and to Brit Bennett, Maya West, Chris McCormick, and Mairead Small Staid for your easygoing brilliance. Rebecca Scherm, Barbara Linhardt, Katie Lennard: see you at the barre, etc.
My friendships in New York have kept a little part of the world warm and steady: thank you to Help Group, to 2018, and to the opera cunts. I’m grateful to Amy Rose Spiegel, a guardian angel; to Derek Davies, for so much musical ecstasy; to Frannie Stabile, the patron saint of butt optimization. Puja Patel, I’m sorry that I never filed that one time at SXSW. Luce de Palchi, I’ll never forget being at a loss for words, on deadline, the night after the election, and you told me that I didn’t need to do anything other than be honest—that what I thought would be enough.
At Gawker Media: Tom Scocca, thank you for your excruciating edits. To my beloved freaks at Jezebel, please come over for a bottle of rosé each.
To Rebecca Mead, Rebecca Solnit, and Rebecca Traister—Andrew would always ask me which Rebecca I was going on about this time—I admire all of you and your work so much, and I felt crushed by happiness when you looked out for me early on. Thank you to Jeff Bennett, who gave me invaluable notes on this manuscript, and to the genius Marlon James for introducing us. To Gideon Lewis-Kraus, thank you for X-raying this book and my personhood. Thanks to the remarkable Mackenzie Williams, who provided research assistance on several essays, most notably “We Come from Old Virginia” and “I Thee Dread.” My dear wife Haley Mlotek, thank you for handing me the subtitle of this book on the day it was due. And to Emma Carmichael: thank you for giving me a career, and a close-up look at how to bring the best out of people, and above all a friendship that I really can’t imagine my life without.
I am so grateful to the MacDowell Colony for giving me a month in paradise. To my incredible agent, Amy Williams, thank you for every last thing you do. Thank you to Jenny Meyer, and to Anna Kelly at Fourth Estate. I still find it laughable