certainty was just a story the mind created to defend itself against the pain of living. Which meant, almost by definition, that certainty was a way to avoid living. You could choose to be certain, or you could choose to be alive. And the only thing she was certain of was this: that between ourselves and the world are a million stories, and if we d

Someday, he thought, he’ll have digested enough Derrida, and he’ll have read all the right books, and heard all the right music, and watched all the right films, and seen all the right art, and through a kind of inner alchemy he’ll find himself being exactly who he right now hoped to become: publicly recognized, shown in galleries, reviewed ecstati

The people he loved, he thought, were visitors, and waiting inside them was the possibility of someone better or someone worse, someone good or someone wretched, someone intimate or someone strange. His wife, son, friends, coworkers—he could not count on any of them to be consistently themselves.

Turns out, if all your companionship and social capital derives from being an important artist, it is frightfully easy to decide that you are one.

Elizabeth had never once set foot in Park Shore, Illinois, and when she’d first asked Benjamin what the place was like, he’d described it as “the confluence of real estate’s three magic l’s.” “And what are the three magic l’s?” she’d asked. “Liberal, leafy, and loaded.”

It was the ritual that was important—the acupuncturist’s thorough examination, the couple’s elaborate date, the mother’s comforting home remedy, the ceremonial mixing of the absinthe. It was in these observances that the placebo effect activated and materialized: the transubstantiation of belief into reality, of story into truth, a metaphor made fl

Whereas most people his age found it pleasant or amusing to reconnect with the long-lost friends now finding each other on Facebook, Jack experienced this same phenomenon as a kind of deep threat. In Chicago, he is not the same person he was in Kansas—he has tattooed his body and changed his whole persona and walled off that part of his personal st

Step 4: Locate the Leader. It had been Elizabeth’s experience that all social groups—no matter how egalitarian they seemed on the surface—had one person who was, at any given moment, on some deep and perhaps even unconscious level, in charge. A kind of social conductor that the group tacitly elevated.

“You know, when I was young,” Jack said, “none of my friends wanted corporate sponsorship.” “Why?” “They called it selling out. It meant you were fake.” Toby snorted. “That’s dumb.” “You think so?” “It doesn’t mean you’re fake. It means you’re good.”