How to Be Alone: Essays

by Jonathan Franzen

Unlike many of the female inmates, who at one moment were wailing like babies and at the next moment glowing with pleasure while someone fed them ice cream, I never saw my father cry, and the pleasure he took in ice cream never ceased to look like an adult’s.

u tell em johnathan franzen!!! fuck those female alzheimers patients!

I understand my life in the context of Raskolnikov and Quentin Compson, not David Letterman or Jerry Seinfeld.

fuck off

But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.