Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

All it said was: “Does Kierkegaard mean us to prefer one of the alternatives? Or are we thrown back on the existentialist idea of radical choice?” That had probably been written by a professor. I recognized the professors’ characteristic delight at not imparting information.

There was a creative writing workbook, with exercises. You had to fill out questionnaires about “your” characters, with their favorite food or color. I felt despair: what kind of person had a favorite color? Then I thought, OK: that was why you needed your imagination, to think of someone different from yourself. The words, “tacos, beige,” written on a piece of looseleaf paper made me feel the foreclosing of every possibility of anything exciting ever happening to me in the rest of my life.

Then I remembered another joke my mother used to make, when she did anything she thought was wrong, like telling a white lie over the phone, or unbuckling her seat belt while driving: “Don’t put this in your novel.” That, too, had always made me laugh, though there was an underlying assumption that was somehow troubling: that the disorder you experienced in your childhood was somehow to your credit, or capitalizable upon in later life—even though, or precisely because, it was a discredit to your mother. So your credit and your mother’s credit were somehow at odds.