Status Updates From In the Land of Men: A Memoir

"The true nature of reality is hidden from us and just out of view."

"As I saw it, my job as a reader, and as his friend, was to try to help save him from himself."

Omfg Dave! you are not funny (at all) but quite self-aware

I'm sorry Miller, but the novelist is the only one responsible for the views of their characters. I've read Disgrace and liked it, with no recollection of anything about it.

"Often I'd find myself wishing he'd just go away. But he never did, not entirely."

"My reflexive response to seeing him, it turned out, was not to go toward him but to turn away."

"Now every president is going to have to have a perfect moral record."

Oh Dave Eggers, you really are hilarious

"People are ghosts until you actually have to start taking them seriously."

"Eventually - it would take a long time, but I would get there - I would begin to understand that in adult life, in the adult world, one had to learn to control not only the expression of anger but also the emotion itself."

"all of them gone now, gone where goblins go."

"You create the theatre that undoes you."

"David had a type? From what I now understood about him, his only 'type' seemed to be female and, sorry to say, without power."

I really want to remove that 'sorry to say.' Never apologize for stating the truth

"If you did not know the swirling haunted-house aspect of David, you did not know David."

The David who used his mental illness as an excuse for everything and anything

"This was a snake putting a spell on a mouse."

Fuck that Miller.

While that week in NYC happened, I was in a drug fueled toxic relationship. Fuck that too. I really shouldn't be critiquing someone whose life played out a lot more functioningly than mine. [And she uses actual words...]

"It seemed very important to keep your idols distinct from your actual people."

Miller is my idol

"He certainly had never been made to feel so powerless and inferior, not in such a tawdry - let's be real: sexist - way. He'd never been made to feel as if his only identity in the world were as a leech, a parasite. No, worse than that: a silly little ephemeron trifler, a life lived only in relationship to another person. I couldn't have expected him to understand."

That's because it always is your fault, David

If only Adrienne ran from the flashing red flags 🚩🚩🚩 Think of the sunshine & flowers, Adri

I like to think inbetween these paragraphs of his speech, she was saying nothing at all and he was actually talking to a (mute) walnut. I dread reading on to find out what she thinks of this pages long pick-up-line. Please don't have sex today you two, at least wait til tomorrow

"This is my story, not his."

Adrienne, are you sure about that?

[are those commas infiltrating my brain?!?!]

Not so much rehearsed, as a (very unfunny) joke said by Seinfeld. I heard it as a teenager - and took it with me on a loop in every waking thought. I'm 15 years younger than DFW, but I'm sure neither Seinfeld, nor DFW came up with it. Although I've never heard anyone else say it

David, (note the v. important comma) you are offering yourself up. Will they have sex today???

'That's in case you say something witty.' (That was David, too: a thief and a vampire.)

NB. the punctuation in this makes me want to scream. No sentence needs 50 commas 😵‍💫

"And was it possible that this was just what he did - entertain ladies with his torrent of words?"

"I'd believed that if I got this job, or even if I got any sort of power, that I wouldn't be scared anymore. I had been hoping that power was the way to undo fear. But then you learn: the fear is here to stay. The fear was always there, except when I was at my desk, with a manuscript in front of me and a pen in hand."

"You had to meet these people in their illusions of themselves and pretend to see them as they wished to be seen. You had to pretend that the mask was real."

And there's the creep right there. Predatory being the least of what he is