I can’t stop reading Jennfier Egan’s books they’re so fucking good. In the middle of “Look At Me” and i read this:

“I leaned close to Paul Shepherd. This was always interesting: the moment when the surface first peeled away and what was underneath—desire, perversion, whatever it might be—moved into the light. The truth. I wanted to see it. Everyone was a liar, blah-blahing their way through life, pretending to be good and constant, to have and to hold and all that. Everyone was a politician, wearing a pious face until the last possible moment when the press unearthed a taste for child amputees or a beheaded mistress chained to a radiator. And I’d been pious, too, at first—I’d believed my own act until the pressure of sustaining it became too much. Since then, I’d sought out the opposite: I wanted to be the child amputee or the mistress, to make my domain the dark corners where I could see the things people took such pains to hide from everyone else.”

I love this. It’s an opinion that i’ve never had exactly but have had ones similar, or nearby, but maybe never took them as far? never gave myself permission to or maybe never wanted to? So to put an opinion like that into a character! That’s really fucking cool. 

Egan’s stuff reminds of me Lorrie Moore in the best way possible. Moore is prob one of my top 5 writers. Her, Vonnegut, Egan probably. who else idk. 

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Like, there’s just something about this line - 

“You look tired,” he said, and the two halves of him fused in a moment of humanity. It wasn’t what I’d hoped for, yet I felt relieved.”

- the idea of the two halves of him fused in a moment of humanity. Like, humanity comes from the blending of the shadow and the face. The heel and the face. Everything connects to wrestling if you want it to...

But there’s something so beautiful about that idea, and the way she expressed it so economically and through the description of a person in space and time as seen by the narrator. A++++