Jeff Gorrie’s Reviews > You Have a New Memory: Essays > Status Update

The story “an endless, soundless loop” is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read. This is an excellent book. Very sad, funny, and beautiful.

This book is a beautiful confirmation of what it is to be human, against the backdrop of our time and the *gestures vaguely,* associated horrors. You don’t write this without walking life uphill both ways and in the rain. This book is a testament to the surreal beauty of noticing the small things, sweating the big stuff, and enduring, despite it all. 10/10, I will be reading this again, and soon.

This book is insane… and very very good

The essay “How to Do the Right Thing” is one of the most agonizing, soul crushing, sad, and well written things I’ve ever read. Aiden Arata deserves to be in the conversation for greatest modern essayist. Didion, DFW, Baldwin, Sontag, Green… and Aiden fucking Arata. That’s the list. Wowza…

This is the sort of book where after reading, you know you’ll be reading every other thing they create, forever.

The essay “America Online” was so cringe inducing that I wanted to vomit reading it. But also, I was alive during that time in history, and the story told in the essay was pretty much EXACTLY how it felt to be young then. This was my face reading it: 😬😬😬 Liking this read so far, although it is sooooo cringe a lot of the time, and like “millennial trying to be an edgy hipster in 2010” vibes