Andrew Hart

"But then that's how you get by sometimes, isn't it? By deploying those little half-truths that keep the world rosy enough to live in."

"Lying is creation ex nihilo. It's parthenogenesis, the goddess Athena is born fully armed from the head -- the mind -- of her father, Zeus. Lying is making things up out of thin air. Except that the air is toxic, corrupting everyone who hears the lie, and the liar most of all."

"Whatever the world is, I still have to live in it. We all do. Maybe that's the truth at the heart of the labyrinth myth -- that we're wandering, lost, always trying to stay one step ahead of our personal monsters, always ready, sword in hand, spooling out Ariadne's thread in the hope that one day we will make it out in one piece."

- Excerpts from Lies That Bind Us, by Andrew Hart

Trevor Noah

“I became a chameleon. My color didn’t change, but I could change your perception of my color. If you spoke to me in Zulu, I replied to you in Zulu. If you spoke to me in Tswana, I replied to you in Tswana. Maybe I didn’t look like you, but if I spoke like you, I was you.”

“Mr. Friedman pressed play on the VCR. The tape started. It was grainy, black-and-white security camera footage, but you could see what was happening plain as day. They even had it from multiple angles: Me and Teddy reaching through the gate. Me and Teddy racing for the door. They had the whole thing. After a few seconds, Mr. Friedman reached up and paused it with me, from a few meters out, freeze-framed in the middle of the screen. In my mind, this was when he was going to turn to me and say, “Now would you like to confess?” He didn’t. “Trevor,” he said, “do you know of any white kids that Teddy hangs out with?” I nearly shat myself. I looked at the screen and I realized: Teddy was dark. I am light; I have olive skin. But the camera can’t expose for light and dark at the same time. So when you put me on a black and white screen next to a black person, the camera doesn’t know what to do. If the camera has to pick, it picks me as white. My color gets blown out. In this video, there was a black person and a white person. But still: It was me. The picture wasn’t great, and my facial features were a bit blurry, but if you look closely: It was me. I was Teddy’s best friend. I was Teddy’s only friend. I was the single most likely accomplice. You had to at least suspect that it was me. They didn’t. They grilled me for a good 10 minutes, but only because they were so sure that I had to know who this white kid was. ...  At a certain point, I felt so invisible I almost wanted to take credit. I wanted to jump up and point at the TV and say, “Are you people blind?! That’s me! Can you not see that that’s me?!” But of course I didn’t. And they couldn’t. These people had been so fucked by their own construct of race that they could not see that the white person they were looking for was sitting right in front of them.”

- Excerpts from Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Tara Westover

“The voices always put Mother on hold when she admitted that she didn’t know my birthday, passing her up the line to their superiors, as if not knowing what day I was born delegitimized the entire notion of my having an identity. You can’t be a person without a birthday, they seemed to say. I didn’t understand why not. Until Mother decided to get my birth certificate, not knowing my birthday had never seemed strange. I knew I’d been born near the end of September, and each year I picked a day, one that didn’t fall on a Sunday because it’s no fun spending your birthday in church. Sometimes I wished Mother would give me the phone so I could explain. “I have a birthday, same as you,” I wanted to tell the voices. “It just changes. Don’t you wish you could change your birthday?”

Eventually, Mother persuaded Grandma–down–the–hill to swear a new affidavit claiming I’d been born on the 27th, even though Grandma still believed it was the 29th, and the state of Idaho issued a Delayed Certificate of Birth. I remember the day it came in the mail. It felt oddly dispossessing, being handed this first legal proof of my personhood: until that moment, it had never occurred to me that proof was required.”

- Excerpt from Educated, by Tara Westover

Stephen Elliott

"Earlier today I talked with the woman I know in Virginia. I locked the door to my office, turned on the camera in the computer, and took my clothes off for her. She told me to turn around and I did. Then I sat naked at the computer and typed. It was ridiculous. I also spent the day preparing for class. If I can keep teaching I’ll be fine. Not really, but I’ll have enough money to make it for a little while. The classes are ending in a couple of weeks and I have nothing new scheduled. If I agree to move to some small town that needs a professor I can get on the tenure path. I could buy a house and teach people how to write. I’ll have to sleep with my students then. Away from the big city it would be my only option. But that’s not really open to me. It’s not really what I want to do. Which is what got me on this track to begin with, arranging interviews with murderers, hoping to make sense of somebody else’s crime. There’s a woman missing. Her husband says he didn’t kill her. There’s a man who says he’s killed eight people but won’t say who they are. There are so many unanswered questions. It’s been a long time since I knew what I wanted, since I had something to strive toward. I keep floating, head poking above the waves, waiting for a purpose to arrive like a boat in the middle of the ocean.

I never did meet anyone like Josie again. Women like Josie don’t make it to their 30s without getting married. If you’re going to meet someone like that you’re going to meet her in your early 20s. And if you’re like me, that’s going to be a time when you’re making your living selling drugs out of your freezer, living in a squat a bullet away from Cabrini Green. You’ll have to represent something, like the other side of the tracks, but safe. Someone who, when the time comes, when the party is over, she can turn around and guide to a place where life is a little more predictable. But when the party was over I didn’t want to turn around. I didn’t want to go to law school or get a real job or love only one person forever though in many ways she was the most lovable person I was ever going to meet. It didn’t matter. I had to test my dissatisfaction. She had gone east so I went west. I got a job in a ski resort, bartending on top of a mountain. I learned how to board, and disappeared in the snow.

That was another time. I have been in San Francisco nine years. I’m suffering side effects from the Adderall. There are always side effects. Insomnia, loss of appetite, headaches, obsession, erratic decision-making. Inconsistency. I took my pill early in the day but I am still awake and full of thoughts. So I lie in bed with the windows open, glad to be alone. It’s the middle of the week. I haven’t been sleeping and I’m missing appointments. My nails are bitten down and bleeding. All I can do is document it all and see where it leads me. I’m taking my meds and the world will be a different place for a while.

I have a self-published book I wrote when I was with Josie, and another book of unpublished poems. I never show them to anyone. The poems are so full of anger. Anger at Josie for being better than me, for always having the upper hand. For loving her family and being loved by them in return. For being someone who got over things and not recognizing that I was a person who didn’t get over anything. But I read that book and those poems and I see something else. I see who I was then. This is who I am now."


- Excerpts from The Adderall Diaries, by Stephen Elliott

Amy Poehler

“I was in fourth grade and in trouble. The students of Wildwood Elementary School in Burlington, Massachusetts, shifted in their uncomfortable metal seats as they waited for me to say my next line. A dog rested in my arms and an entire musical rested on my shoulders. I was playing Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, and it was my turn to speak. Dorothy is Hamlet for girls. Next to Annie in Annie and Sandy in Grease, it is the dream role of every ten-year-old. Annie taught me that orphanages were a blast and being rich is the only thing that matters. Grease taught me being in a gang is nonstop fun and you need to dress sexier to have any chance of keeping a guy interested. But The Wizard of Oz was the ultimate. It dealt with friendship and fear and death and rainbows and sparkly red shoes.”

“That voice that talks badly to you is a demon voice. This very patient and determined demon shows up in your bedroom one day and refuses to leave. You are six or twelve or fifteen and you look in the mirror and you hear a voice so awful and mean that it takes your breath away. It tells you that you are fat and ugly and you don’t deserve love. And the scary part is the demon is your own voice. But it doesn’t sound like you. It sounds like a strangled and seductive version of you. Think Darth Vader or an angry Lauren Bacall. The good news is there are ways to make it stop talking. The bad news is it never goes away. If you are lucky, you can live a life where the demon is generally forgotten, relegated to a back shelf in a closet next to your old field hockey equipment. You may even have days or years when you think the demon is gone. But it is not. It is sitting very quietly, waiting for you. This motherfucker is patient. It says, “Take your time.” It says, “Go fall in love and exercise and surround yourself with people who make you feel beautiful.” It says, “Don’t worry, I’ll wait.” And then one day, you go through a breakup or you can’t lose your baby weight or you look at your reflection in a soup spoon and that slimy bugger is back. It moves its sour mouth up to your ear and reminds you that you are fat and ugly and don’t deserve love. This demon is some Stephen King from-the-sewer devil-level shit. I had a lucky childhood. My demon didn't live in my room. My demon just walked around my neighborhood.”

- Excerpts from Yes Please, by Amy Poehler

Mark Manson

“We joke online about ‘first-world problems,’ but we really have become victims of our own success. Stress-related health issues, anxiety disorders, and cases of depression have skyrocketed over the past 30 years, despite the fact that everyone has a flat screen TV and can have their groceries delivered. Our crisis is no longer material; it’s existential, it’s spiritual. We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we don’t even know what to give a fuck about anymore.”

“Uncertainty is the root of all progress and all growth. As the old adage goes, the man who believes he knows everything learns nothing. We cannot learn anything without first not knowing something. The more we admit we do not know, the more opportunities we gain to learn.”

- Excerpts from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, by Mark Manson

Cormac McCarthy

“He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal wins to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.”

“Years later he stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He’d not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on the world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation. He let the book fall and took a last look around and made his way out into the cold gray light.”

- Excerpts from The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

Taylor Jenkins Reid

“‘You’re the most beautiful woman here,’ Don said into my ear as I stood next to him. But I already knew he thought I was the most gorgeous woman there. I knew, very acutely, that if he did not believe that, he would not have been with me. Men were almost never with me for my personality. I’m not suggesting that charming girls should take pity on the pretty ones. I’m just saying it’s not so great being loved for something you didn’t do.”

- Excerpt from The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Michelle Richmond

“And then I think of the kids. It’s not that I have this overwhelming sense that my patients can’t live without me. But for all the talk of adolescent resilience, teenagers are also fragile. What would it do to them if their therapist suddenly vanished? The most elemental difference between my teenage clients and the married couples is this: The adults arrive convinced that nothing I can say will change anything, while the teenagers believe that at any moment I might utter some sort of magical sentence that instantly wipes away the fog. Take Marcus from my Tuesday group. He’s a sophomore at a magnet school in Marin. Marcus is an instigator, combative, always looking to get things off the rails. At our last meeting, he asked me, 'What is the purpose of life? Not the meaning–the purpose?' It was a tough spot for me; once he threw down the challenge, I needed to respond. If my answer missed the mark, I would expose myself as a fraud. If I refused to answer, I would look like a poser who was of no use to the group. 'Difficult question,' I replied. 'If I answer, will you tell us what you think the purpose of life is?' He jiggled his right leg. He wasn’t expecting that. 'Yes,' he replied reluctantly. Experience, time, and education have taught me how to read people and situations. I generally have a decent sense of what someone will say or how they will react, even why people do the things they do, and why certain situations lead to certain outcomes. Yet somehow, when I least expect it, I discover a hole in my knowledge. What I don’t know, perhaps what I haven’t even considered, is this: What does it all add up to, what does it mean? I looked around the circle of teenagers, and I gave it my best shot: 'Strive to be all good, but know that you are not. Try to enjoy every day, but know that you will not. Try to forgive others and yourself. Forget the bad stuff, remember the good. Eat cookies, but not too many. Challenge yourself to do more, to see more. Make plans, celebrate when they pan out, persevere when they don’t. Laugh when things are good, laugh when things are bad. Love with abandon, love selflessly. Life is simple, life is complex, life is short. Your only real currency is time—use it wisely.'”

- Excerpt from The Marriage Pact, by Michelle Richmond

Liane Moriarty

“It was strange, because she always felt that she hid herself from Erika, that she was more 'herself' with her 'true' friends, where the friendship flowed in an ordinary, uncomplicated, grown-up fashion (emails, phone calls, drinks, dinners, banter and jokes that everyone got), but right now, it felt like none of those friends knew her the raw, ugly, childish, basic way that Erika did.” 

“He knew how the audition was going to affect their lives for the next ten weeks as she slowly lost her mind from nerves and the strain of trying to scrounge precious practice time from an already jam-packed life. No matter how much time poor Sam gave her, it would never be quite enough, because what she actually needed was for him and the kids to just temporarily not exist. She needed to slip into another dimension where she was a single, childless person. Just between now and the audition. She needed to go to a mountain chalet (somewhere with good acoustics) and live and breathe nothing but music. Go for walks. Meditate. Eat well. Do all those positive-visualization exercises young musicians did these days. She had an awful suspicion that if she were to do this in reality, she might not even miss Sam and the children that much, or if she did miss them, it would be quite bearable.” 

- Excerpt from Truly, Madly, Guilty, by Liane Moriarty