Maybe that's the way I'm private - I respect the privacy of "my" characters? Anyway, we're getting close to the whole "relatability" and "likability" thing.

The scare quotes burn off like fog.

Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture's prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the service of love. No piety is safe, no orthodoxy, no easy irony. The scare quotes burn off like fog.

Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.

I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.

The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.

I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.