hailey zipfel’s Reviews > Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir > Status Update

“Nonfiction is, at its best, an act of putting the world back together, or tearing some piece of it apart to find what’s hidden beneath the assumptions or conventions, and in this sense, creation and destruction.”

“These politics contaminated Kerouac’s On the Road for me. I got as far as the protagonist’s encounter with Terry, who he calls “a dumb little Mexican wench with a simple and funny mind.” And then the protagonist takes off and leaves her. The woman is a stationary object... Halfway through, I put the novel down. The book was going to go on without people like me, and I was going to go on without it.”

“Images of levitation arose unbidden... Could I have [a body] too ethereal to be part of the clashes on the surface of the earth? ...I could still see and feel myself rising up to the level of the streetlamp, outside my apartment, hovering in the halo of light... safe not just from predators but from the laws of physics, the rules governing human bodies... from the weight of all those fears and that hate.”

"You are, in your youth, walking down a long road that will branch and branch again, and your life is full of choices with huge and unpredictable consequences, and you rarely get to come back to choose another route. You are making something: a life, a self. And, it is an intensely creative task, as well as one it is more than impossible to fail—a little, a lot, miserably, fatality. Youth is a high-risk business.”