Leia’s Reviews > The Idiot > Status Update

Before that summer, I knew almost nothing about the Beatles. I didn’t know why it was important to be a mop-top, or what a mop-top was. Whenever I heard older people talking about them, I just tuned it out. There were never any bad consequences. I really thought I could go through my whole life that way. But the Beatles turned out to be one of the things you couldn’t avoid, like alcohol, or death.

He said we had to start calling it just “Ukraine,” without the definite article, because in Russian “Ukraine” meant “borderland,” and to call a whole country “The Borderland” was insulting. Apparently if you called it simply “Borderland,” people would think it was a proper name, semantically unrelated to its other instances.

We waded into the pond. Translucent minnows circled our ankles. They were so alive. It was almost pure life in those little bodies, there was so little room for anything else. The sun was low and there was a breeze. The water felt ice-cold. I felt paralyzed by the thought of going in. Then I resolved myself and dove under.

I had chosen a ten-point font, both to conserve paper and to discourage people from reading the story, which I didn’t think they would enjoy. Even though I had a deep conviction that I was good at writing, and that in some way I already was a writer, this conviction was completely independent of my having ever written anything, or being able to imagine ever writing anything, that I thought anyone would like to read

I thought maybe Against Nature would be a book about someone who viewed things the way I did—someone trying to live a life unmarred by laziness, cowardice, and conformity. I was wrong; it was more a book about interior decoration.

I was thinking about the equivalences between a tissue box and a book: both consisted of slips of white paper in a cardboard case; yet—and this was ironic—there was very little functional equivalence, especially if the book wasn’t yours. These were the kinds of things I thought about all the time, even though they were neither pleasant nor useful. I had no idea what you were supposed to be thinking about.