It never occurred to me that Becca was quietly reading me this whole time, in a workmanlike and scholarly way. This figure of a caring, diligent, loving but unromantic reader didn’t fit into my vision of both literature and life, which was filled with showy virtuosity and arrogant command. Our friendship was, from the beginning, structured by two things: my imperious pronouncements that things had to be a certain way and her generous habit of nodding along and humoring me as far as was responsible. I didn’t see that for all those years she was unassumingly working away at a competing reading
...more
