“Writer was the only role I could see myself occupying in society, the only one that might hold everything that I was. Queer, overly emotional, burdensomely perceptive, reluctant to do any kind of work whose purpose was opaque to me, ravenous in ways that made me an outlier. It was an occupation that seemed to offer respite and relief, but also was connected to the sublime. It offered the gift of self-forgetting, a transcendence on the other side of which lay insight.”
