Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

always talking about respecting women,

never did seem interested in me. Frankly, I wasn’t their numb...

engaging with me only as a girl, as a woman, as a member of the category he pursued because of what he was—it felt euphoric and freeing,

An eyeless creature was going in and out of its cowl.

At first, I wanted to do a good job, but I soon grew demoralized.

What if I got repetitive strain injury again, like with the gardening catalog?

But this was such a helpless little spurt, it seemed so young, like

new spring plant.

Why did everyone’s

favorite part have to be something different?

In its simplest form, the aesthetic life involved seducing and abandoning young girls and making them go crazy.

Maybe it was OK to just “ruin” men more broadly: not the way men ruined girls, by driving them out of society into convents or mental institutions, but, rather, by getting them to pay for things,

Where did you draw the line between trying to make a particular person fall in love with you and give you money, and trying to get money out of the world more generally?

What was it about America in particular that seemed to make one’s life unaesthetic?

It was starting to occur to me that, when it came to having sex, I had mistaken an emergency measure for a sustainable policy.

On the other hand, it was becoming increasingly clear that literally nothing was fair.

Had it always been this easy, and I just hadn’t noticed?

He had a huge cock, terrifying, curved upward, like a horn.

course, you couldn’t have a party without alcohol; I understood this now. I understood the reason.

The reason was that people were intolerable.

avuncular

and I thought: Would it have killed him to have coffee first?

increasingly imperative for there to be some achieved or manufactured climax—not just so that he would stop, but so that he would feel as masterful and gentle and adept

my desires overlapped, or could overlap, with the concrete social reality.

still what I felt toward him was something like gratitude, and a feeling of submission that was hard to differentiate from desire—because

because you had to submit to something.

Maybe you would feel happier if you had more responsibilities.”

skintight leather pants that

looked too expensive, and thus also somehow sad.

“Because all people do is reject and disappoint each other,”

bathos.”

“What do people ever do but torture each other?”

How could a key even be a key if they were all the same?

Yet to

say that I was on any objective level enjoying myself would have been an overstatement.

Shevchenko?”

That was the essence of the Rules: to treat the man you were interested in just like the man you weren’t interested in.

they thought their fancy degrees entitled them to display their personalities.

how could you be so graceful in writing and so clumsy in life?

Somehow, it felt like only

British and Australian people were expats, just like only Russian and Polish nobles were émigrés.)

My mother offered me Valium, telling me not to put it in my novel.

several depressing and yet insufficiently numerous volumes.

feeling how much my mother would disbelieve me, and would say I was doing “revisionism.”

My indifference to cream and puff pastry was spoken of admiringly by my mother and aunts.

Maybe my father was right and I tended to “dwell” on imagined slights and bad feelings from the past.

except the people who were actually from there, and who didn’t feel a particular need to describe it.

ironed

Why did I want to cry when I saw those perfectly stacked squares?

Yes: they sounded normal, and I didn’t.