I was asking myself, Who is Tim Kreider, and why did I order this book? Then I read the beginning of the first essay, "Reprieve": "Fourteen years ago, I was stabbed in the throat. This is kind of a long story and less interesting than it sounds. . . . After my unsuccessful murder I wasn't unhappy for an entire year."

And I thought, Oh yeah, THIS guy!

Here is what else Mr. Kreider had to say in essays about politics, friendship, "outrage porn," human fallibility, and discovering in his early 40s that he had two half-sisters:

"What dooms our best efforts to cultivate empathy and compassion is always, of course, other people."

"We have irreconcilable visions of the kind of country we want this to be: some of us would just like to live in Canada with better weather; others want something more like Iran with Jesus."

About his high-achieving father: "If there were such a diagnosis as unipolar mania I'd almost wonder whether he'd had it."

About his wastrel uncle: "His visits were like a whiff of cigarette smoke in church."

"I tend to think that anyone who conforms too closely to his or her assigned gender role must not be all that independent-minded or brave."

"My policy has always been, when someone asks you if you will travel to Wisconsin to nurse them through sex change surgery, to say yes."

"Hospital stays are one of the few times in adulthood when we have an excuse to drop all the busywork that normally preoccupies us and go to be with the people we love."

"What people want, above all else, is not to be happy; they want to devote themselves to something, to give themselves away."

"In 1996 I rode the Ringling Brothers circus train to Mexico City, where I lived for a month, pretending to be someone's husband."

This book also taught me legal jargon such as detour and frolic, cultural jargon such as Chinese hell money, and psychological jargon such as floridly psychotic.