Status Updates From Dead and Alive: Essays

“The narcissism of the present is that it wants the past to conform to its present demands. You can’t learn the lessons of the past if you rewrite them in the retelling.”

Zadie Smith on Joan Didion:

“But I remain grateful for the day I picked up Slouching Towards Bethlehem and realized that a woman could speak without hedging her bets, without hemming and hawing, without making nice, without poeticisms, without sounding pleasant or sweet, without deference, and even without doubt.”

“We thought our lives would be reasonably paced and tell a story full of meaning. Instead it’s just been one thing after another, and there are no neat conclusions, except the certainty of death.”

“But the unusual thing about misogyny is the elaborate intellectual superstructure that has for so long supported and celebrated it, not as a blind spot or as pernicious ideology but, on the contrary, as perfect vision.”