So many experiences cited here feel universal—the selfishness of early adulthood is apparent. The fact that you’re still a block of marble that must let events chisel away pieces of yourself until a finished you emerges. It is habitual to find yourself in the pages of a memoir, to parse and parallel your own past with the words. But something here–it was the Foucault quote, actually–made me pause. The palpable sadness, beyond the tepid wistfulness of age, shook me up. There was a longing for a set point in time—a specific and calcified time— that I’ve never known myself. It was directly after, “How to leave him alone without abandoning him?” that I finally looked at the back cover, almost idly, and caught words like “elegy” and “grief” before I looked away. Something is going to happen. Something bad.

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