Brief Interviews With Hideous Men

by David Foster Wallace

she always took care to acknowledge, dreary or self-pitying or like one of those people who are narcissistically obsessed with their “painful childhoods” and “painful lives” and wallow in their burdens and insist on recounting them at tiresome length to friends who are trying to be supportive and nurturing, and bore them and repel them.

just a few well-chosen words to help her get some realistic perspective on the day’s despair and get centered and gather together the strength to fight through the emotional agony of the next day,

Everything I saw stayed slightly red for

months,

‘Imagine not existing until a man needs you. Being there and yet not there. A willed translucence. Provisionally there, contingently there.