Of the various possible partitions of humankind, the division between those who swim and those who don't is actually a very well-known one. Levante belongs to the non-swimmers set and when he goes to the seaside he is a spectator. Miranda is a protagonist instead...She simply enjoys swimming and if she was presented with the set theory she wouldn't necessarily understand. "I like sports, that's all."
The subject of Johny Boy is on the tip of her tongue. She knows that confronting Aaron would be the most honorable. But it would give him an opportunity to invent a clever lie,...She'd have to check every website constantly because she would never know whether he was back working one of them.
"I was always a good writer, but I didn't think I had an imagination. I liked pottery because I understood that if I just practiced over and over again, I could get a form just right...That's really how I started to feel comfortable writing poems -– by trying to attend to form...I think the forms gave me a space to work out what really was there in my imagination."
"...when I wrote fiction I was often unconscious about which part was from memory and which from imagination. For nonfiction, I tended to double check my memory, and I often turned to other sources to verify my memory. But if I found a conflict between a second source and my own memory, I might believe in myself more."
"...I believe to become a great writer or a very good one the writer must avoid organized teaching. I think like a shrink, a father, a lover, a mensch, but not as a writer. When I come to write, I go inward, very inward, and I allow my unconscious to blast through, often ooze, into awareness; that is how I write."
"When I figured out the gloved, masked woman's task, I remembered my advice to my teenage daughter...Sarah, who had the cat on her lap, suddenly thrust the animal off of her lap and screamed. I spotted the problem right away, a turd clinging to the fur on the cat's ass...I told her if that happened to me I would kill myself."
"...This tendency to slide between the past and present, to place events inside an historical echo chamber, to draw us into a world where fact and myth are entwined and time becomes `timeless', is classic `Kapuscinskian' territory."
...Forthright and insightful throughout, this assessment of how writers and their writing are perceived in retrospect is woven throughout New York in the Fifties, the end result being a memoir that situates personal experience in a broader historical context, remaining engaging and enjoyable all the while.