Lake Success

by Gary Shteyngart

If he were a novelist like the neo-Guatemalan and he had to write a chapter in a novel about what it was like to get the diagnosis, he would say it felt like being young again and being told for the first time that someone you loved didn’t love you back.

But that’s what hearing the diagnosis was like. This feeling that the future you imagined with someone would, in all actuality, never exist.