B.D. McClay points out that Anne Elliot is 27 in Persuasion, that Lily Bart is 29 in The House of Mirth. Fanny Price is 18 when most of the action unfolds in Mansfield Park, which I just finished reading. We don’t know Anna Karenina’s exact age, but she’s in her late 20s. Emma Bovary kills herself when she is only 27 years old (insert joke about the 27 club). It’s funny to me that I spent my 20s in agony at the passage of time, and now when I’m on the cusp of turning 30 I’m calm, excited. What I was anxious about was not time; it was plot. I was interested in how a particular story would play out. It was the story of my writing—the story of a book—and then the story of my love life. I treated my life as a novel, because all I’ve ever known is how to read things like I read novels. Sometimes that’s made things better, and sometimes I think it’s made things worse.

Lately I’ve been circling back to Jane Austen. I read Mansfield Park recently because of this review, the only Austen novel I’ve never read; the thing I find interesting about it is the idea that you can determine someone’s character simply by waiting. In fact, the optimal thing to do is simply to wait instead of act. Fanny Price’s strategy, you could say, was to go slow. (Of course, the whole point of Fanny is that she doesn’t have a strategy. She is the most passive girl in the world, which is sort of the point.)

In most novels, our character’s fates are determined their errors of judgment, often a result of going too fast: Marianne commits to the charming, aesthetically and intellectually sophisticated Willoughby too fast, only to realize later that he is an untrustworthy cad; Emma leaps into affair after affair with unsuitable men, after marrying someone she barely knows. Isabel Archer says no to Warburton and Caspar Goodwood, only to say yes to Gilbert Osmond, who is a very bad man indeed. Dorothea marries Casaubon because she wants someone to worship intellectually, only to realize he is a poor partner, and does not live up to her lofty expectations.

So it’s bad to go too fast. But also going slow does not mean things will work out for you: just look at Lily Bart. Reader, you see now that all my life I have been tortured by the oldest problem, just like everyone else: you have limited discernment, and limited time. But love is important, and we must get it right. Many model it as game theory, but the interesting thing about Jane Austen is that she understands that marrying well is also about virtue ethics.

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Hans Hofmann, The Conjurer (Small Version), 1946

So much of loving someone is entrusting them with your messiest emotions. You’re surprised when I pout like a child despite knowing that it’s unnecessary, embarrassing. But when I’m happiest I don’t suppress my range. The older I get, the more I feel capable of honoring the social contract as I understand it—of being gracious, polite, understanding, communicative, direct with a variety of different people in a variety of different situations. All of it feels so different from sinking into someone and knowing that you’re held.

The opposite of that feeling, of course, is placing your weight on someone and feeling like you’re sitting on a rickety stool that’s about to collapse. I’ve done that: it’s not a good sensation. The truth is that the fault was mine. I don’t know if I evangelize radical responsibility as a way of life, but understanding my own faults in judgment has certainly helped me work through many things. People are very complicated; they have mostly good intentions; we have to, as Leonard Cohen wrote, “let them off the hook, help them off the hook. Recognize the hook.”

In most relationships, I believe we are happiest when we love someone exactly as they are, tell them honestly when we think they should do something differently, acknowledge to ourselves the ways they do and don’t meet certain needs, and enjoy the joy, pleasure, and recognition we feel in their presence. Different people will be able to meet us to different extents, which is what I see as one of the fundamental rewards of friendship: we can love people, support them where they are and be supported where we are, without asking them to bear our entire weight. In this way, my friends have totally transformed my life, and transform it still. I’ve noticed that people are significantly more likely to work through major life problems when they have even one or two people they can tell everything to, who care about them and give them sage counsel. Just being witnessed and cared for is enough. Being truly close to one person can change your life more than you think.

Partnership is different, because it involves taking on someone else’s problems as your own. Of course, other people are separate from us, and it is very bad to take on total responsibility for a capable adult human being; we are each responsible for our own psyche, our own life. And yet if you are in a romantic relationship with someone you start to find that the way they think and feel naturally bleeds into how you think and feel; the way they express and receive love becomes entwined with how you express and receive love. When you have fundamental disagreements about how you approach things, the differences can become very painful.

On a recent trip to the Alps my friend pointed out that she thinks I have a very moral way of viewing relationships, in the sense that I believe there’s a way people should act. I’d never thought so, but when she said it I realized that I am obsessed with best practices. To be clear, I don’t always successfully implement those best practices, but all my writing is fundamentally about what you should do when you love and are loved, how to parse the various complexities that follow. Hearing her say this made me understand how a previous relationship failed simply because we were so far from seeing eye to eye on best practices that I lost faith in the enterprise. Our differences alienated me. Alienation, of course, is the opposite of intimacy. To me, the possibility of partnership is the feeling that despite the fundamental chasm between two human beings, love allows us to bridge the gap; alienation is the feeling that the gap cannot be bridged, and moreover, that I do not want to.

Best practices in relationships, of course, are both objective and subjective. Other people have different values, and different needs. It is not for me to judge their values, their needs, or the way they go about fulfilling them. It is up to me to honor my own, and if I care about them, find a way to support them in theirs. Supporting other people’s freedom is sometimes painful, sometimes humbling, sometimes liberating. More and more I try to save my philosophizing for writing, and my generosity for life.

It is hard to bridge the gap. We spend so much of our lives trying to figure out attachment, dependence, freedom, trust, acceptance, rejection, and commitment. I see people in happy partnerships try to figure it out with their friends; I see people circle around it again and again with their romantic partners; I see people get it right, get it wrong, get it right again. I don’t always have the language for what my heart knows. The living heat of your body is the living heat of your body, responsive, yielding, speaking to me without words. The love I feel now is the shock of realizing anew what I’ve already known for a long time. The same old Jack Gilbert poem all over again: What we feel most has / no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.

His novels are deeply haunted by pain. James Wood, in one of the best lectures I’ve ever listened to, says:

Dostoevsky always stressed the aesthetic principle in our response to God, and found more moving than words the image of Christ. For his 58th birthday, his wife gave him a reproduction of Rafael’s Sistine Madonna. “How many times,” she wrote, “have I found him in his study in front of that great picture, in such deep contemplation that he did not hear me coming in?” Seeing suffering, being made to witness it, is not of course a solution to suffering. But perhaps, it’s the only comprehension we can really possess. A contemporary philosopher, Kenneth Surin, ends his book on the problem of evil by saying that suffering is indeed a theological mystery. So, he essentially ends with the incomprehensibility theory. That it is indeed a theological mystery, and that all we can do is let it exist as an interruption. That’s the word he italicized. As an interruption in our sense of divine order and goodness. When I first read this book, years ago, I thought Surin’s conclusion little more than postmodern relaxation, a kind of preciousness in which Surin had managed to find a convenient metaphorical blanket for the elephant in the room. But I’m not so sure, now, and find the idea of interruption, and the kind of interruption provided by Dostoevsky in novels, a useful way of addressing these issues.

Interruption, first of all, in the way that I interrupted my lecture to read from the novel. The interruption that the representation of pain brings to our largely unbroken existences. But there’s also the interruption that Dostoevsky’s peculiarly open-ended novels provide. Bakhtin famously called this the dialogical principle, by which he meant the way in which ideas in Dostoyevsky circulate alongside other ideas, and none seems to be privileged by the form of the novel. “For Dostoyevsky,” wrote Bakhtin, “There are no ideas, no thoughts, no positions, which belong to no one-- which exist in themselves. All ideas are attached to characters, who then warp and modify them. And this applies as freely to obviously good ideas, like the preaching of the monk Zosima in the Brothers Karamazov, who says we must love each other, as it does to the obviously bad ideas, like Raskolnikov’s utilitarian nihilism.

We might write novels to work out problems in our own life, like Palahniuk says. But novels are about bearing witness to something we fundamentally cannot solve, which is to say the inexplicability and incomprehensibility of human life. From George Steiner’s Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky:

Belinsky stated that the question of the existence of God was the final and all-determining focus of Russian thought. As Merezhkovsky remarked, the problem of God and of His nature had “absorbed the whole Russian people from the Judaizers of the fifteenth century to the present day.” The iconography of the Messiah and the eschatology of Revelation gave to political debate a bizarre and feverish resonance. The shadow of millennial expectations lay across a stifled culture. In all Russian political thinking—in the pronouncements of Chaadaev, Kireevsky, Nechaiev, Tkachev, Belinsky, Pissarev, Constantine Leontiev, Soloviev, and Fedorov—the kingdom of God had moved terribly close to the declining kingdom of man. The Russian mind was, literally, God-haunted … Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov are, if you will, fictions and poems of the mind, but central to their purpose is what Berdiaev has called the “quest after the salvation of humanity.”

The Brothers Karamazov is a chronicle of an unhappy family, but is also a novel about belief and disbelief, the necessity and impossibility of God, the“logical claustrophobia of Christian commitment” as a response to human suffering. The characters are incredibly vivid. Dmitri, chaotic, violently passionate, wildly loving. Ivan, the charismatic atheist who is so close to being a believer. Grushenka, a Mary Magdalene character if I’ve seen one, opaque, vindictive, charming and damaged with her swollen lower lip, her lovely body that will run to fat before she’s 30. Katerina Ivanovna, proud and unbending. Alyosha, saintly, beatific and naive.

From some notes I wrote after reading War and Peace:

Tolstoy’s work is powerfully animated by a precise awareness of the universality of human experience—he can illustrate the ways we are different because of his deep sense of how we are alike. His writing feels nearly Biblical to me—one almost has the impression that a prophet has descended to impart tales of human folly and wisdom. And the topics that Tolstoy instructs us on, especially in War and Peace, are not much less ambitious than what you’d expect of a religious text—good and evil, altruism and greed, freedom and necessity, the nature of romantic and familial love.

War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov are books of incredible scale. One way of looking at it is that you and I, dear reader, do not live in God-haunted 19th century Russia, but the problems of contemporary America do not seem any less immediate, vivid, religious in nature. In fact, like many others, I've lately been hyperfixated on the idea that our problems are astonishingly religious in nature. Meghan O’Gieblyn writes in Interior States (her essay on attention is currently circulating on X, and I highly recommend reading… well, every other essay she’s ever written):

William James once noted that “the most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing.” In other words, even when a person outwardly denounces a long-standing belief, the architecture of the idea persists and can come to be inhabited by other things. This is as true of cultures as it is of individuals. Some of the essays in this collection examine the ways in which our increasingly secular landscape is still imprinted with the legacy of Christianity. The testimony, as a narrative form, endures in the rooms of twelve-step programs and in contemporary writing about motherhood, which often takes the form of conversion narrative. Meanwhile, the faith’s epic story of messianic redemption lives on in the utopic visions of transhumanism and in liberalism’s endless arc of progress.

The mood in the labs is fever-pitched and overtly eschatological. But as a society, we no longer seem to write novels explicitly about God, or at least not since Gilead. I’ve been thinking about James Wood all week and why it is that I was pretty much disinterested in literary criticism until I read him. Like Meghan O’Gieblyn, he grew up evangelical; this interview describes him as “a writer for whom criticism is a way of proselytising for literature.” But he sees literature as inherently an earthly form, focused on our absurdities and failings. It is possible to write a mystical novel (he categorizes Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Moby Dick as such) but it is hard to write a Christian novel, perhaps because “narrative is inherently secular.”

I agree with Wood that the most vivid, poignant character in the Brothers Karamazov is Ivan, the atheist who cannot reconcile the existence of God with the existence of children suffering.

The Russian philosopher Lev Shestov, for instance, thought that Dostoevsky, for all his orthodoxy, was so corroded by doubt that when he came to imagine the doubter Ivan, he couldn’t help giving him a vitality and appeal far beyond the saintly and bland Alyosha. Those of Shestov’s mind think that even if the novel demonstrates that atheism is finally a murderous idea, because it kills old Fyodor Karamazov, religion is so damaged by Ivan’s onslaught that it cannot mount a proper reply.

In real life, months before Dostoyevsky started writing The Brothers Karamazov his two-year-old son Alyosha died following an epileptic fit. Knausgaard:

Dostoyevsky “loved Lyosha somehow in a very special way, with an almost morbid love, as if sensing that he would not have him for long,” Anna wrote later. When his son stopped breathing, Dostoyevsky “kissed him, made the sign of the cross over him three times,” and broke down in tears. He was crushed with grief, Anna wrote, and with guilt—his son had inherited epilepsy from him. Outwardly, however, he was soon calm and collected; she was the one who wept and wept. Gradually, she grew worried that his suppression of grief would have a negative impact on his already fragile health, and she suggested that he visit the Optina Pustyn monastery with a young friend, the theological wunderkind Vladimir Solovyov. There they met the elder of the monastery—the starets—Ambrose. “Weep and be not consoled, but weep,” he said to Dostoyevsky.

What happened to Dostoyevsky is profoundly visible in the novel: The Brothers Karamazov is a book written by a man who has experienced unbearable suffering, and struggles to reconcile it as a profound believer. Dmitri’s passion is Dostoyevsky’s passion; Ivan’s torment is Dostoyevsky’s torment, just as Alyosha’s goodness is his conception of goodness. The Brother Karamazov is suffused with pain, but I agree with Knausgaard that the kiss that Alyosha gives Ivan at the end of the Grand Inquisitor chapter (the best chapter in the book, and as has been argued, one of the best chapters in any book anywhere) feels like the heart of the novel. Atheism debates about ideas. But faith is not an idea but an act.

The Wood lecture I quoted above continues by elaborating on this point:

Perhaps all narrative, indeed, corrugates dogma. Puts truths in motion. Narratives’ continuousness, if you think about it-- this happened, and then that happened, and then that happened--is secular rather than religious, because it is endless in the way life is, rather than eternal in the way religion promises. In other words, like life, narrative only seems endless. It’s bottomless rather than circular. But eternity, religious eternity, stops time by expanding it into infinity, and making a circularity of it. Time will come to an end, we are doctrinally instructed, when the apocalypse comes.

Viewed that way, AI could not be a religious movement if it was not a story about the apocalypse, about time coming to an end. I wonder if there’s a way in which the most pro-literature thing you can do is to believe in narrative, which is to say: to believe that time will continue.

Tony Feher, Come Out and Play Stephen Jay (detail), 2013

Finishing the book feels like travelling through time. I can tell I’m more sensitive than usual this week, overwhelmed. I remember where and when it all started, and who I was back then.

I’ve learned our actions have consequences. I do understand you deeply and why you’ve made the choices you’ve ma…

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Pleading, 1984 by Jeff Wall

Safety without aliveness is deadening; aliveness without safety is disorienting. You can tell where you have room to grow by examining your relationship and asking yourself what you’re more afraid to expect: safety or aliveness?

If you want to know if something is alive, ask yourself: does it thrill me?

If you want to know if something is safe, ask yourself: do I intuitively feel I can depend on it in every realm that matters?

If you care too much about safety, you’ll be terrified of risks that lead to more aliveness because you’re so indexed on what you might lose: This is good enough.

If you care too much about aliveness, you’ll struggle to create a solid foundation from which to experiment and grow, or the intuitive sense that you are fully held.

If you’re never experienced safety and aliveness at the same time, you probably doubt that they can coexist. We love to depict them as mutually exclusive in our culture. Manic pixie dream girl or nagging wife. The guy you fuck versus the guy you marry.

Dating is somewhat of a luck problem, but mostly it’s a search problem. Most of us are bad at it because we don’t understand what makes us feel both safe and alive in work, love and life. If you don’t believe it’s possible, you might not recognize it when it shows up.

For most of my life I couldn’t find the love I wanted because I was unable to let it in. I wasn’t ready. We think of giving a skill, but receiving is also often a learned ability. Discernment matters. You might conceive of yourself as having high expectations, but that doesn’t matter if you expect the wrong things. How in touch are you with what actually matters the most to you?

My sense for most of us is: not very. Getting in touch with what you really want requires a level of intuition that we’ve either explicitly tuned out or never listened to in the first place. What does your body say, what does your heart say, which is the voice of fear and which is the voice of love? What are you bracing against, is it really so bad? It takes time and sincere personal work to answer these questions.

I always think about Elizabeth Gilbert’s anecdote in Big Magic about how ideas will find you, but also leave you if you don’t sincerely give yourself over to them. I believe that love is the same way. You have to give yourself to it it; you have to work at it; you can pretend to yourself, but you can’t pretend to the universe. If you give yourself over to the right love, however, you might just feel the best of all feelings: safe and alive.

I saw a daddy longlegs on the ceiling while I was showering and didn’t panic, even when it started slowly descending in my direction on an invisible silken thread. Instead I grabbed a backpack, coaxed it inside, and let it out. This is a sign that I’m in a good state of mind. What I’m feeling is the opposite of panic. The circumference of your eyeballs seems extravagant. They’re very large. You told me no one had ever said so, though they’ve complimented your eyelashes and mouth. I’m sure someone you’ve met has noticed the same thing. Maybe it coalesced into an unspoken thought and maybe it remained sub-perceptual. It’s odd how the texture of someone’s skin can create feelings in others without closeness, without touch. We absorb so much we can’t put into words.

Can you be loved if you don’t feel loved? Is what I want simple or impossible? What makes someone act like that? I’ve let go all of my questions, which for so long seemed so important. The act of inquiring, the relentless search for the deepest truth. I thought that understanding would protect me. I understand now that nothing will protect me. When I look at the things that other people have, their houses, relationships, children, organizations, convictions, delusions, and faith, I feel our vulnerability acutely. Vulnerability is the human condition, which I spent so long rebelling against. I will fight it no longer—I will submit to being stripped bare in front of God. My intellect, intuition are merely gifts I’m borrowing, my body is only a vessel. N got it right when he said his partner could look however, as long as he could see her soul flashing in her eyes. You can immediately tell if someone is smart by their eyes, but intelligence is not sufficient. Neither is kindness. When you put your hand on my back I wonder if you can sense my soul through my body and that’s what you’re responding to.

I feel you so deeply with no effort. I feel you in my stomach, close to the knobs of my spine, which makes sense because the stomach is where feelings are stored. This is why hot girls have IBS. I feel you the tips of my fingers and the soles of my feet. In my tear ducts, you feel like a certain welling. With you, there’s no need to say I’m passionate. Everything is obvious. The way you watched my face during the movie reminded me of another time at the ballet in December. Time folded back on itself, and it was so sweet. Right now, everything is so sweet. When I think sweetness I think of the CoQ10 chews I bought on P’s suggestion that look and taste like starbursts. I loved so much candy when I was a kid, I wish you’d known me then. I had such a hard time being a kid, you’re the first person who I believe would really understand that. For so long, that incredible sense of alienation, an inability to relate. When I was six years old I wrote a poem. It was about angels and I could tell my teacher was impressed, and that was the beginning of my whole life. I don’t miss anything about being a kid except learning to read every night with my mom, and the way she would put my book back into a ziploc bag for the next day. I learned to read very fast because of her. Also because I was born voracious.

It’s so disorienting to look back and know that none of it was wasted. All that time spent worried for nothing. I would do it again, I would do it all over again, and I would properly enjoy it this time. I’m gonna go back and read the Ann Patchett essay. I’m gonna go back and read the Amy Bloom memoir. It’s so obvious to me you don’t know anything about John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands’ first date. It’s okay because I know. Well, he asked her out and they went to dinner and she wasn’t into him because they didn’t have anything to talk about. So he asked her what she wanted to talk about and she said literature, plays, the like. Two weeks later he calls her and says, I want see you again, I read this book and that book and that book—and I want to talk about them with you.

That’s how it started. I suppose he was an alcoholic, but so what. I don’t know when I started thinking conversation was the heart of romance. I guess my life started changing when I got the allergens injected in my lymph nodes, so maybe we should instead conclude that smell is the heart of romance. In Venice when I stay at P’s place I always sleep better. Close to the ocean. Some of the most fulfilling moments of my life have happened when I’m sitting all alone wracked with feeling, on a plane or just in my apartment, feeling like a beached whale. Fullness, intensity and despair. Whales thrash violently when stressed, just like me. I’m currently operating at a level of corniness where I’m ready to write poems about the 52-hertz whale. G#1 is the 12th lowest key on a standard 88-key piano keyboard. Take me out back and shoot me before I get too sappy.

I don’t think that the first line of Bruce Springsteen’s song I’m On Fire is creepy. It reminds me instead of the movie Pig, where Nicholas Cage goes on a wild mission to rescue his kidnapped truffle pig. You can love someone so far past reason and be unable to save them. I can no longer think about Orpheus and Eurydice without irritation, or The Transit of Venus. (I lied. I’m gonna go back and reread The Transit of Venus.) You can go to the underworld in an attempt to bring someone back, only to find out that the reason they ended up in the underworld is because they’re an idiot. Go figure. Well, idiocy is no deterrent to love.

I got a perfume in Japan that smells like hawthorn flakes. I used to eat roll after roll of them when I was a kid. We bought them from a Chinese grocery store called Big Crazy in Richmond, BC. This was usually after I was berated for an hour in piano class by my teacher, who was emotionally abusive and had a bad perm. Okay, one other thing I miss from my childhood was eating White Rabbit candies until the silver cap on my cavity-ridden tooth came off. And packets of WANT WANT Senbei Rice Crackers. And Tim Hortons iced cappucinos when I was a preteen with an eating disorder, and my parents tried to reason me out of it by telling me that I had to be a little fatter to grow a little taller. Over time, my mom came to worry that the way she’d raised me had made me too fixated on perfection. She thought I didn’t know how to be kind to myself, and she was probably right. For a long time, I didn’t know.

I think I know now. Though I did still think it was a bit too much when Amy started reciting Wild Geese by Mary Oliver during our therapy session on Tuesday. First of all, I can recite Wild Geese by heart, so there’s really no need. Second of all, my favorite short story collection is Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill, you’d really think I know quote unquote I do not have to be good. But she’s right, she’s always right, I have to let her have that. The way I’m feeling now is that I want to track Marie Calloway and Chris Kraus down and give them both hugs. We were girls together.

Everyone I know loves Taiwan. I’d been holding out on visiting for some years until I was on a group walk and encountered a friend of a friend who had interned at Bytedance and grown up in Taiwan and politely informed me that I should visit soon, before China invaded. Well okay. I took her suggestion seriously and a plan was made in the group chat.

I went with my friends C and L and my mom. My therapist was like Are you sure you want to go with your mom? I was like yes my mom is a great hang. She’s met all of my friends, plus she speaks Mandarin, which I assumed would be a bonus even though I was told everyone in speaks English in Taiwan.

The vacation was meaningful for me. People have written about this more comprehensively than I have, but my unconventional work life means that while I have very flexible hours I also don’t really have any distinct starts or stops in my work life. I have coaching calls every week, I try to post on Substack every week (though I’ve been more relaxed about it for the past six months… that’s probably gonna change, I’m in the mood to write more), I’ve been working on the novel continuously for a while. My agent got back from maternity leave in May and I sent her a revision that I’d been working on for the past few months. I’d tried to get the edits done before she left for maternity leave, but she’d gotten back to me and basically informed me that my edits were not good. Which I accepted: I’d done it on a pretty tight schedule and tried to give her exactly what she requested, which essentially meant it came out somewhat lifeless. I knew that I could do a better job if I gave myself some time and just vibed it out, but it felt high stakes to give her the revision when she came back because, well, I really want the book to be sold and published! And I’d put six months of my life into revising it! During these six months I’d luckily made the smart decision to hire this amazing novelist as an editor so I could get a pair of eyes on it. I highly recommend Anna; she is the most professional person in the world, her comments were super helpful, and most importantly having someone else read it and offer feedback kept me tethered to reality. When you’re doing something with a very long feedback loop you can sometimes start to feel totally insane. (I know that’s how my friends feel: they’re all like, is there really a novel? Does it actually exist? I haven’t seen it. Which isn’t helped by my air of extreme secrecy around it. But at this point I can assure you: the novel really exists, and Claude had no part in its creation. Thank God.) Anyway, the week before I left for Asia, which I spent partially in Edge Esmeralda and partially at Interact (more on Californian utopia communities soon at ava.substack.com!), my agent emailed me and said she was mostly through the revision and liked it. Which was an incredible relief. I was so happy. I still have work to do on it, but this feels like a turning point. And going to Asia is the age old way to celebrate turning points… right?

DAY ONE

My mom and I were on the same Sunday flight. C and L had gotten to Taipei the day before us. I ended up sleeping six hours of the 13 hour flight, and my mom was out out the entire time. When we landed I was amused by these signs at the airport… are there really so many people try to smuggle pork floss through security? Evidently yes.

As the weather forecast had anticipated, Taipei was overcast, wet and sticky. I have a love-hate relationship with humidity: I was born in Shenzhen, where it was so hot my parents kept my head shaved (!!) for the first two years of my life and I have pathologically dry skin and hair that thrives in wet environments, so in some ways I'm very well-suited to it. But I choose to live in seasonless San Francisco because I hate the heat.

It was raining when we got to the Airbnb and would continue raining on and off the entire trip. I spent the whole time wearing these white sandals from the Row I got for $50 (I’ll be bragging about that until I die). We donned our rain jackets and umbrellas and wandered outside. We ate at Chapman’s Noodles, which was pretty good. I immediately learned that cash is king in Taipei, especially for restaurants. Taiwan is like Japan in that sense—they have these weird extraneous gadgets like a machine where you place your order but the restaurants won’t take Apple Pay. After dinner I requested we go to this (touristy) speakeasy called Book Ing, that was ostensibly book themed but actually was Studio Ghibli themed? I ordered a Howl’s Moving Castled Bloody Mary. One thing that you may or may not know about me is that I am super fixated on tomatoes and as a result I’ve consumed probably thousands of Bloody Marys in my life. On planes… at bars… at brunch restaurants. I will happily embarrass myself at a fine dining establishment by asking if they can make a Bloody Mary. You have to stand for something in this life.

C and L instantly got on with my mom, which I was happy about. She told us a little bit about her (hilarious) relationship with ChatGPT, who helps her shop. When she’s at Marshall’s or whatever she’ll take pictures of whatever she wants to buy and Chat will be like “That’s not worth the money.” When I heard that, I immediately thought, OpenAI is going to make a trillion dollars.

DAY TWO

In the morning we ate Food Life, which had amazing breakfast sandwiches. My mom really wanted to hike Yangming Shan, but I said we had to wait until she bought sneakers because all she’d packed were Crocs. Instead we walked over to Daan Park, which was peaceful and green. I noticed that there are a lot of old people out and about socializing and doing taichi—Taiwan is definitely an elder-heavy society. There was actual netting on the basketball hoops, which C and L said were a sign of a high-trust society (apparently people in the US steal the netting?). Afterwards we went to the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. Despite repeated applications of sunscreen, it was so sunny at this point I felt like passing out, and insisted that we seek shelter in the air-conditioned inside of the all. There was a Botero exhibition which I was thrilled about—I love Botero’s art! I have a little Botero cat sculpture on my coffee table that Maran gave me. I guess taste in art is genetic, because my mom and I both were obsessed with his paintings. I like his idea that volume is sensuality.

I wondered out loud if he was a feeder but everyone else refused to engage with me. After we finished browsing we decided to go to Eslite Spectrum Songyan. The bookstore is apparently open 24/7. It was really interesting to see the Asian covers of Western novels. I hope that one day my novel will have an Asian translation and cover, too. I found the books on AI very funny—like this one, which seems to be mostly about how to generate anime girls?

We ate lunch at FUJIN TREE Taiwanese Cuisine & Champagne, which was honestly some of the best Asian food I’ve ever had.

The chicken brought me to tears. In the afternoon we mostly browsed stores—I bought a slouchy summerweight jacket made by Ulterior and a pair of emerald green Rototo socks from Groovy, which had a great selection of Japanese brands. Another standout was this great outdoor equipment/gorpcore store called Field Day. I bought a baseball cap with cat ears (never saw a hat with ears I could turn down) and discovered this great running gear brand called Unna. I loved these shorts but didn’t buy them because they were available for cheaper online.

Honestly, I would’ve probably purchased them if I knew how much sweat and rain was ahead of me, but whatever. At night we briefly walked through the LinJiang Night Market and ate at this cute izakaya called Shinjai Shokudo. We finished off the night by getting cocktails at Bar Mood.

DAY THREE

We ate breakfast at Pei Pei Tong Breakfast Restaurant (沛沛彤早餐), which actually has a different sign and name. The guy who served us was definitely an Asian baddie. As readers might know, one of my longtime complaints about San Francisco is there are not enough male Asian baddies here though there are many female Asian baddies. After that we went hiking at YangMing Shan. I was nervous because of the heat (and I did end up completely soaked in sweat), but it was really beautiful. Taiwan has amazing butterflies.

There was a bird that had the most haunting call. For lunch we ate at Halal Chinese Beef Noodles. We spent most of the afternoon in the Chifeng St area, which has a lot of cute vintage shops. I really liked Ede Select Shop—I bought a pale pink Margiela midi skirt there. They also had a great Issey Miyake bag but I’m banned from buying bags. I also liked Par Store, which had vinyls, posters, and magazines. I bought a fringe Moschino top and a BCBG dress from Masako Vintage. We went to a few bookstores: Athena, Kimotsi, and 浮光書店. We were all still full from the beef noodles, so for dinner we just ended up going to this very charming bar called Cafe Society with a lot of Jura wine.

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Hilma af Klint, Eros, Group II, No. 2, 1907.

I’m a passionate romantic, Tammy says so. I don’t like the way the consultants at the clinics upsell you in Seoul, though everything is very efficient and meticulous. A great novel could be written from the perspective of a Korean plastic surgery consultant. I didn’t get anything done except three non-invasive…

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On the phone in France, he said: “It’s not worth it.” I was being so negative, too negative, and he stopped me in my tracks. The words coming out of my mouth didn’t sound like me, and I couldn’t help but wonder how I’d gotten to this place. I’d read in a Buddhist book once that if you’re deluded enough to believe you’re enlightened, a relationship will soon come along to challenge your self-concept. The relationship will make you want to travel a lot, but you should resist the urge. Funnily enough, I met him shortly after a spiritually transformative time in my life. I was ecstatic for a sustained period of time, and then humbled. I am a fatalistic person, which means I believe that I was born to feel what I’ve felt.

Years after meeting this person I met someone else, whom I thought was different in important ways. This, too, I believe I was born to experience. I have at different times in these relationships felt extreme joy, extreme frustration, and quiet faith. Esme Wang, from The Collected Schizophrenias: "Hung on my bedroom wall is the quote attributed to Joan of Arc: "I am not afraid. I was born to do this." However my life unfolds, goes my thinking, is how I am meant to live it; however my life unspools itself, I was created to bear it."

Was it hard? It’s the same as asking whether my relationship with S was hard. Then and now, I experience love as easy: the easiest thing and the most absolute. Just as being whacked by a dog’s tail is like being brushed by the wing of an angel, to be clobbered by love is to be patted on the head by the hand of God. Love knocks you off course; love is totalizing and ruinous; love is cruel and frustrating; love is the only redemption we can know on this earth.

I believe the primary way in which I am fortunate is that everything I’ve ever experienced has made me believe more in love and not less. Also, I have a great sense of humor.

If I had to tell you what happened without telling you exactly what happened, I’d say: for a couple of years my life stopped making sense because people I loved dearly did not behave in ways that made sense to me, and everything got crazy. And I wondered: how will I get through this? How can anything possibly resolve? What can I say to communicate what I feel? What can I do to make things sane again?

I’m sure many of you have experienced this particular form of insanity: something happens, the unbearable senselessness of the world comes sharply in focus, and you go berserk. You cannot accept what is happening.

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Kitty Kielland, Peat Bog at Jæren, 1901

You can get stuck in these ways of thinking that are antithetical to your flourishing. They’re sinkholes, gravity wells. There’s this meme floating around that as children we believe quicksand is a much bigger component of life than it actually is. Adult life has taught me that while literal quicksand isn’t around that much, metaphorical quicksand is everywhere.

It’s so easy to dismiss other people’s traps. We look at someone who falls into a weird cult or stays with an abusive boyfriend and think, That could never happen to me. But it could, and it probably has—it’s just likely less dramatic.

One hard-won piece of knowledge: if you’re in an unhappy relationship, it’s probably because you’re doing something wrong. Yes, it’s your fault, just as you suspected. Even if you aren’t actually doing something wrong, you at least chose the person. But often the way to get out of it is to go the opposite direction. Instead of doing more of what you’re already doing, try doing less. Instead of going left, go right. Think about what people do when they’re in quicksand: they struggle. What does struggling do to them? They sink.

When you’re in a sinkhole, your entire model of the sinkhole is probably flawed in some important way. Another way of putting it: the reasoning that got you here is not going to get you out. What you need is not a modulation of effort, but instead a change of perspective.

An exercise to try: think about the people you know who are in unhappy situations, whether professional or personal. How many do you think need to try harder, vs how many simply have the wrong approach? People’s problems are generally created by their approaches, which is why trying harder tends to just drive them in deeper.

The problem is that your approach has probably worked for you up until this point in time. As they say, coping mechanisms that hamper you in adulthood tended to be survival mechanisms in childhood.

When I reflect on the sinkholes I’ve been stuck in, I never think “Oh, I was so dumb.” I got stuck because I stumbled into situations that spoke to my deepest beliefs about what love meant, what care meant, what effort meant and what I deserved. There is no possible way I could have avoided getting stuck. Some drives are deeper than your self-concept, primal and irresistible. And yet: getting unstuck means fighting against your deepest drives, and winning.

Yes, it’s difficult. If it was easy, no one would ever get stuck. And it’s humiliating to put an incredible amount of time and effort into a problem and admit that you just haven’t made very much progress. But I try to think about it this way: humiliation is the beginning of freedom. If you can admit that you haven’t made very much progress, you can maybe admit that you should try something different. Which, again, is no guarantee of success, but at least you’re no longer pushing yourself deeper into the sinkhole.

Often people think: if someone only suffers enough, they will surely realize something is wrong. As someone who loves to suffer, I am here to assure you that’s not the case. You would not believe some people’s capacity for misery! What’s gotten me out is something different: the mundane passage of time and a growing disinterest in repetition. The thing with sinkholes is that they tend to involve a lot of cycling, and after a while you start to notice: this again? THIS AGAIN? You thought you were in a traffic jam, but suddenly you realize you’re on a ferris wheel. Of course, it’s up to you whether or not you want to get off. The view can be very nice from the highest point of the Ferris wheel, which is probably why you got on in the first place.

NOTE: I got the bog metaphor from Adam Mastroianni’s wonderful post, which should be compulsory reading for literally everyone and has helped me lots.

David Hockney, Red Celia, 1984

M and I talk about how we no longer wish to be dominated by relationships, knowing that we both like to be consumed. What I’ve learned is that you should choose your consumption carefully. During my last relationship I kept trying to negotiate the working conditions—can we just do this, so it can be a little better? I felt that what I fundamentally needed was transparency. Those conversations never went anywhere, and after a while I refused to have them.

When I was feeling particularly frustrated, I would think about how if the apocalypse happened and we all had to go into nuclear bunkers, the object of my affections would probably put me in the bunker two doors down. And then he would apologize, in that helpless, hapless way—what else is there to do?

J says I am eminently lovable. I had the thought that last week that a problem I have with my therapist is that she loves me too much. This stresses me out because it reminds me of my mom, who loves me with her whole heart and wants me to get everything I want. Because I am so Type A, I interpret this love as the obligation to achieve the good life and make it look easy. Though I am a Buddhist, I don’t even believe in achievement. (Though if you know me even a bit, you know that’s obviously not true.)

This week I was thinking that my worst and best quality is that no matter what happens to me, I will stretch out, roll over and pop up with a Cheshire Cat grin. I can make abasement look sexy. Or indifference, kindness, cruelty. It doesn’t matter. (Though it matters!) Style is fate, as they say.

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From R. D. Laing’s Knots (1970)

I’ve always thought there’s something very powerful about Carolyn Elliott’s framework of Existential Kink. Sasha has a great post about it, but I’ll roughly summarize it as integrating your shadow (in the Jungian sense) by accepting that you might be into what you say you don’t want. Like, let’s say you complain all the time about your terrible job, but you’ve refused to quit over a period of years. You might actually achieve integration by realizing that you actually, in her language, get off on hating your job. In other words, you have what you want.

On TikTok I sometimes watch content by women who are in relationships or married to inmates. Some of them conceive children with their partners while said partners are in prison. Now, momentarily putting aside other concerns, it’s very difficult to date an inmate because you can’t see them that often and you don’t know what the relationship will be like when they are released from prison. But you might also be able to imagine how that could be a feature rather than a bug. So someone might consciously identify as desperately missing their incarcerated partner, but on some level they may also have chosen that partner precisely because they are in the most literal sense not available.

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Zhang Enli, The Wires (3), 2015

In Los Angeles, gardenias. In the Bay, bougainvillea and hydrangeas. Summer in San Francisco feels like the center of the world. I associate June with drain flies, coconut-scented sunscreen, tan lines from my sports bra. War and Peace is a winter book; Bonjour Tristesse and The Ravishing of Lol Stein are summer books. I noticed recently that I don’t care about Freud anymore and I no longer obsessively reread Annie Ernaux, Graham Greene, Flaubert. For many years, I would chew through bildungsromans before bed; now I exclusively read shitty fantasy. How I expect books to help me has changed. I used to hope they would explain the vagaries of my emotional life, assure me my appetites were understandable if not typical. I no longer require the same reassurance. More and more I sense that ageing is a process of gradual simplification. I am no longer bothered by complexity, and more and more I’m barely intrigued by it. What interests me is nature, physicality, how one person can move or change another. In other words: summer books.

*

I follow experiences all the way to the end. I can work on the same thing for a very long time. It’s not simple for me to find something that’s a good fit, but I experience compatibility as easy, immediate and seductive. I take things hard but I bear them easily. At my best I’m amused by everything. Amusement, I see it, is the ultimate gesture of gratitude: to take something seriously is also to believe it can be seriously funny and fun.

Six years ago, I started writing consistently. I take writing seriously, but it has been both funny and fun. Part of that fun includes prolonged moments of extreme despair and hopelessness. Writing makes me feel free and often it makes me feel incredibly stuck. For me, a creative life means that there’s always something that I’m evading and something I’m running towards. It requires gradually building up my tolerance for intensity, disappointment, and repetition. It’s made me more interested in pain, and more sensitive to joy. I’ve tried to treat it as a marathon: it’s more important to keep going than to run fast.

I’m in love with writing still. More and more, all the time. It is what I hoped it would be.

*
In sixth grade, over summer break, I attempted to read the classics. I’ve spent every summer since more or less the same way. Other summer books: Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, Mating by Norman Rush, Herzog by Saul Bellow, Inseparable by Simone de Beauvoir, the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante, Blue Skies, No Candy by Gael Greene, Anais Nin’s diaries. Summer books have a heat to them.

Each year, summer feels like starting over. I go to a new country and for around eight days feel like I could be anyone I want. Then I think, like clockwork: I want to go back to my house in San Francisco and be myself. Eat a popsicle, call my mom, give my dogs a belly rub.

The more I write, the more I feel that it takes me home. My preoccupations change, but my obsessions run deep. I am drawn to similar stories about similar girls. There’s always a party on a warm evening and there’s always a boy, and the face of the boy is always a little haphazard, because his face is a representation of our narrator’s hopes and dreams. It’s a repository for memory and emotion. Love is when we assign irrational amounts of meaning to someone based on how fast they speak, the way they look at us, the color of their eyes. Like all deep magic, it’s so simple and dumb it has no choice but to be profound.

*
I miss summer in Utah, hot and green, the mountains craggy against the sky. Summer in Vancouver, taking acid in Stanley Park, last month’s rain like a distant dream. In Shenzhen, it rains sometimes in the summer, and the rain that runs down the back of your neck is warm. In Tokyo I read Timothy Williamson and walked until my feet were raw and drank a cocktail out of a tiny bathtub. This year I’d like to see some more Bernini sculptures. His masterpieces focused on moments of extreme narrative tension: Pluto grabbing Persephone as she cries, Apollo catching hold of Daphne just as her skin turns into bark. I guess you could say they are summer stories.

Patrick Procktor, Gervase IV, acrylic on canvas

I was at dinner with a longtime friend today and he casually brought up something I’d said to him a few years ago. I’d completely forgotten making the remark, and my immediate reaction was, Why would anyone say that? What I said was honest—way too honest.

I think I’m generally tactful, but in certain moments I can be brutally direct. My directness irritates me. It reflects an inability to fake it that causes problems. I’ve been having conflict this week with another longtime friend. I’m mad at him and he can tell. He said, “I don’t think you like me very much right now.” And I thought: how is it that I cannot muster the basic motivation to pretend that I am okay with things as they stand, when it would make my life easier? But I just can’t.

I don’t think this is a virtue. In fact, it’s almost certainly a vice. I understand that the gears of civilization are oiled by the ability to fake it. And to be clear, I can smile and nod along to a conversation I’m not enjoying with best of them. But the more invested I am, the less I seem to be able to pretend. And the longer I stay in my particular line of work, the worse it gets.

If I love you, I will not be oblique with you. I will be direct, and if you are oblique with me, I’ll press the question until you are direct. Sometimes this means that I get answers I don’t like. I’m pretty much resigned to that. It’s taken me a long, long time to learn this:

I believe there is extreme value in being in touch with your deepest emotions. They can tell you very important things about how you should live your life. I’ve also learned that you are the only person who is responsible for figuring out what they are. Do not think that you can go with the flow and someone else will anticipate your sincerest needs and desires for you. That is a great strategy for not getting what you want.

I think my relationship strategy is something like this: you should sincerely express your deepest desires, learn about the other person’s, and see if the most important parts of yourselves say yes to each other.

The problem is of course that we are forced to take other people at face value, and they may be varying degrees of in touch with themselves. Sometimes people are not quite what they present themselves to be, and that’s not because they mean to be disingenuous. I try my best to figure out if what I observe about someone else lines up with their self-narration.

As I become more self-aware I become a better narrator of my own desires. More and more my goal is to become someone who is so sincere I compel sincerity in others. I am working on sounding less like someone just shoved Veritaserum down my throat, but I think my directness reflects an impulse I find endearing: the desire for there to be fewer barriers between me and the people I love.

It’s definitely an interesting dilemma: certainly no one believes that you have to disclose every thought to the people closest to you. But I also believe that most of us disclose too few. That’s why I use the term “deepest emotions”—it’s fine to omit small things, maybe even medium size things, but I think there’s nothing more corrosive to a relationship than omitting core parts of your experience. You can tactfully pretend the elephant isn’t there, but the elephant is still going to step on you.

I do wish all the time that I could fake it. Why can’t I just ignore the stupid elephant? Everyone else is doing such a great job at ignoring it and I don’t want to disturb the party. It would be so nice and so easy to hang out right up until the moment I get smushed. (Is it even so bad to be smushed?) However I’ve reluctantly decided that each person is allowed to have their own threshold, and I don’t need to defend mine: I can just live it. It doesn’t make me feel virtuous, but it makes me feel like myself.

Elizabeth Murray, Study for "Body and Soul", 2001

I don’t think you’re good at arguing. I don’t feel that when we disagree you ever assume the best of me, the way you do when you’re calm. I bet everyone in your life feels the same way about you.

It’s okay. Everyone doesn’t have to be good at everything. For instance, you are infinitely more gentle and kind than I am. I know that it is my calling to learn to love people as they are. I’ve always found it so hard to manage my intensity, the sheer weight of my expectations for others. Everyone I’ve been close to has said that I’m impossible to control. If you get in my way, I will chew through you like an animal chewing off its own leg to get free.

I’m also receptive, easygoing and warm. I love to listen: I do it for a living. I do best with difficult people. You can drop me in any room of people anywhere for an hour and I’ll have fun. But in me, receptivity is the flip side of aggression.

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Peter Doig, Hitch Hiker, 1990

ANNOUNCEMENT: We are a hosting a Love Science x Bookbear Express matchmaking party on May 15th!! Take the quiz here and get your spirit animal. It’s gonna be very very fun.

The thing I like about desire is that it’s unfakeable. You cannot force or even simulate well intensely wanting someone or something. The very act of forcing by definition shuts it down. There is so much in life that can be attained simply through diligently going through the motions; desire is not one of those things.

I don’t like to fake things. I will not pretend to like you if I don’t; I won’t pretend to understand something I'm clueless about; when I stop having a good time, I leave. If I disagree with you and I care about you, I’ll tell you. Maybe this is not the best way for everyone to be, but there are a lot of people in this world who are willing to fake everything—I think they compensate for my bluntness. Also, I spent most of my life faking things, so I’ve paid my dues.

Visa: “I never fully realized how much pressure I was under, as a kid, to pretend I was fine when I was not. I pretended inwardly as well as outwardly. because I internalized “It’s not okay to be visibly not okay” from my social environment. So I became invisible to myself.” He goes onto say that writing is his “reaction against internalized tyranny.” It’s mine, as well. Before I started writing every day, I simply couldn’t make contact with my real feelings.

Accepting what you really feel is inconvenient, especially if you’ve built an entire life on the feelings you believe you’re supposed to have. There are extreme costs to integrating. I think about this Murakami line literally every day: “You don’t have to judge the whole world by your own standards. Not everybody is like you, you know.” Right: people are different from me, they feel different things, value different things, have different fears.

I know that the heart of love is acceptance. And yet I’ve spent so much time and energy trying to help people reconcile their conflict. All of it on some level is an escape from the fact that I value enormously a certain purity of feeling and the complete integration of it into my life. For me, desire has never been a part-time project. When I accepted that everything became easier.

Knowing who you are necessarily means tolerating that other people are different. Perhaps that’s why desire is conditional and love is not—love is about accepting the essence of someone, being moved by them; desire is more tied to a way of being. I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve learned I shouldn’t try too hard to convert people to a different way of being (unless they’re paying me, in which case… fine). That’s putting too much of the onus on me and not enough on them.

To me, desire is aliveness. It’s automatic, uncontrollable and rare. The body doesn’t often line up with the soul. In the novel I’m working on a character complains to her friend about the difficulty of finding true love when you can’t prove definitively that it exists. Her friend replies that it probably exists, but that doesn’t mean you’ll find it. (And of course, finding it doesn’t mean you’ll keep it.) I feel the same way about desire: there are no guarantees about finding it, no guarantees about losing it. I try my best to just live it.

To be happy on this earth you have to believe in certain things, fight for certain things, have the will for the fight. Lately, I have to confess to a sense of alienation. It’s enough to make a girl turn to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. From Lives of the Saints: “Some take to the bottle, some look to the sky, but it is all the same. Byzantine empires, lives …

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• I’ve been reading The Vital Spark by Lisa Marchiano and really enjoying it. It’s very similar in tone to Women Who Run With the Wolves, if you enjoy that.

  The mythic banishment of Lilith speaks to a universal truth. There are qualities such as kindness, empathy, and agreeableness that can help us get and stay connected with each other, and there are fiery qualities such as anger, shrewdness, and forcefulness that can help us get and stay connected to ourselves.”

  Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves,” according to the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. Staying cut off from our vitality is a form of anesthesia.

• Why do high agency people put themselves in low agency situations? I was puzzling over a friend of mine who is incredibly capable but consistently chooses to be in relationships where their competence is just… not useful. Then I realized I have my own version of this. I suspect that many of us do. It’s a strange paradox—you know you’re able so you take on difficulty, and you can’t quite make the connection that you’ve consciously chosen to be in a situation where you have little to no leverage. We all choose the ways we are trapped and the ways we are free, and I’m starting to believe a certain type of high-functioning person is irresistibly drawn to making themselves artificially low-functioning. Mirages and oases look similar for a reason, in other words.

• Most people don’t have a type. I find this to be very true in matchmaking: the people most likely to find awesome partners they’re happy with tend to have about two or three things they really care about, and they don’t sweat the details at all.

  But regardless of how you meet people, the crucial pieces are: Find someone you think is reasonably attractive and then hang out with them at least three times, doing things together that will inspire deep, connection-building interactions (such as playing a conversation card game and maybe answering the “36 Questions That Lead to Love” from that old New York Times essay). The person you spark with might be too tall or too short, or be a dog person to your cat person, or have an extremely boring job. Even so: They might be just your type.

TECHNOLOGY

• Dwarkesh profile in NYT!

• I just want to take a moment to solemnly promise that no part of Bookbear Express will ever be AI generated. You’re here for the artisanal emotional angst, and I plan to deliver :)

• Kevin Kelly on uncertainty.

CULTURE

• The Japanese designers reshaping menswear. I, too, love Auralee and have a take on Evan Kinori and shop at C’H’C’M’ and generally know a lot about menswear. Mostly because I am a control freak. I will not be elaborating.

• I did not know about the concept of the kunstlerroman! But it is relevant to me!

• On Marilyn Monroe. On my coffee table I have a copy of the 1962 Eros volume that contains The Last Sitting (the last pictures taken of Marilyn Monroe before she died). This essay does a great job of describing the photos, which are beautiful, strange and sad.

  In the pictures, Marilyn sports a peroxide bouffant and modish makeup—white eyeshadow with a heavy crease line, a colorless lip. Monroe was drinking heavily during the shoot, and her eyes bear a glazed expression, gauzy and vacant. She wears costume jewelry, scarves, and little else. Modern sensibilities cast these photos in a different light—how ethical is it to take nude pictures of someone so drunk?—as does the fact that Marilyn crossed out many of the images on the contact sheet, drawing great big red Xs over photos where she looked tired, or where the camera captured the scar that ran across her abdomen from an endometriosis surgery. But the portraits are transfixing, precisely because they show her famous fragility on display. Her skin is papery and loose; she has deep lines at the corners of her mouth; drugs and grief are aging her hard. And still, she is magnetic, radiant.

Roy Oxlade, Rose and Old Clubs, 1984

1. If you want to be more perceptive, Occam’s Razor helps a lot. Every time someone does something you’re even slightly confused by, ask yourself, What’s the most straightforward theory for why they’re behaving like that? Why does Mary seem to dislike Jeff? Why is Tina so anxious when the subject of Jenna comes up? Why does Marissa consistently date guys who suck? The answer is usually surprisingly simple, but most people never even bother to come up with a theory. If you keep theorizing and testing it against reality, eventually you’ll develop a great intuition.

2. Being comfortable in large groups and parties is just a learned skill. For many years, I identified as someone who was very comfortable in one-on-one settings, but unsure of how to socialize in groups. Then I started hosting more parties and events for work and realized I’d mythologized this “comfortable in small groups/comfortable in big groups” thing way too much. It’s literally just a thing you teach yourself how to do. Assume a normal and friendly affect! Talk to people sincerely and unpretentiously! Circulate! If needed, break it down into a set of procedural steps—this is how I enter a conversation with a group of people I don’t know, this is how I leave the conversation when I’m bored.

3. Not everyone needs to like you. In fact, people are allowed to dislike you for dumb reasons—projecting their own insecurities, completely misunderstanding you, whatever. It is in your best interest to just let them dislike you. In fact, being secure in yourself and comfortable with being disliked will actually make you more likable.

4. All the popular dating advice out there is advice for anxious women. If you are an avoidant woman you should not be taking this advice. In general, hyperfixating on any particular dating advice is likely lead you down the wrong path.

5. As a reformed people pleaser myself, I ardently disapprove of them. Constantly repressing your true desires in order to “please” someone else leads to worse outcomes for everyone involved. However people pleasing is an deep-seated addiction and you have to accept that most people are just Stuck That Way. Focus on rectifying your own people pleasing tendencies instead.

6. When multiple people say the same very bad thing about someone, it’s best to take it as true and avoid them. I don’t mean, like, they’re difficult to work with or they’re a negligent boyfriend or whatever—I mean that they’ve hurt someone in a way that’s beyond the pale. Back away slowly.

7. People who lack discernment will cause you a lot of problems. They’ll date annoying people, work with annoying people, befriend annoying people, and if you are sufficiently close to them you will be impacted by all of this.

8. Try to be dispassionate in your assessments of people, but forgive them easily. Life is easier when you let people be who they are instead of resenting them for it.

9. If you think you lack discernment because you always end up enmeshed with questionable people, what’s likely going on is that they are bristling with red flags and you ignore every single one because your family of origin or previous romantic relationships have conditioned you to see them as normal. Try to identify someone who is more relationally discerning than you and think deeply about what they index on.

10. If you think of someone, text them :)

11. Don’t let not texting someone back for a very long time stop you from doing the above.

12. If someone is avoidant, let them avoid you. Check in at a reasonable interval to let them know that you care.

13. Be gracious, even when you don’t have to.

14. From Codependent No More: The surest way to make ourselves crazy is to get involved in other people’s business, and the quickest way to become sane and happy is to tend to our own affairs. When someone asks for your advice, it’s fine to give it. But I recommend only giving them further advice if you notice them actually listening and implementing what you’re saying. Otherwise you will become as crazy as they are.

15. If someone is in a pretty good relationship and you think it’s not the perfect relationship for them, Do Not Say Anything. If someone is a definitively bad relationship, Say Something Once. Then move on.

16. I find the mentality of “your critics are always right” to be very helpful. Try to find the grain of truth in what people say about you.

17. At the same time, what you think of yourself is ultimately more important than anything else. Our culture castigates people wholesale and then forgets about it six months later. Opinions come and go, but self-regard persists. If you don’t like yourself you will punish yourself in cruel and unusual ways.

18. Rejection is protection. Seriously. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but once you get it you really get it.

19. Conflict can become really fun once you get it right! Conflict can be incredibly painful when you get it wrong. Don’t let the excruciating pain turn you off conflict—passionately disagreeing with people is what makes life worth living.

20. Try to see it from their perspective. Even if they’re obviously wrong and you’re obviously right ;)

21. Resentment happens when you’re unwilling or unable to stand up for yourself. Instead of fixating on how someone else is letting you down, examine how you’re letting yourself down, and change your behavior.

22. Glennon Doyle: “Your job throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.”