Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

It had always been part of my identity to feel more objective than either of my parents—to be able to choose between their views, to retain the parts I found useful and discard the rest.

Anyway, I never had been able to understand how girls like that cared so little about worrying their parents.

Now that she was in the secret, now that she knew something that so much concerned her, and the eclipse of which had made life resemble an attempt to play whist with an imperfect pack of cards, the truth of things, their mutual relations, their meaning, and for the most part their horror, rose before her with a kind of architectural vastness.