Chapters (60)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Personae
- I: Early Days
- One. Control
- Two. Doubt
- Three. Fate
- Four. Same
- Five. Fine Arts
- Six. In Loco Parentis
- Seven. Settling
- Eight. Neighbors
- Nine. Prospects
- Ten. The Lucky
- Eleven. Instruction
- Twelve. Same
- Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
- Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
- Fifteen. The Reason
- Sixteen. That Person
- Seventeen. Predictably
- II: Writing Teacher
- Eighteen. Early Poems
- Nineteen. Motivation
- Twenty. Allegory
- Twenty-One. Grief
- Twenty-Two. A Portrait
- Twenty-Three. Veils
- Twenty-Four. Soft Power
- Twenty-Five. Lists
- Twenty-Six. A Break
- Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
- Twenty-Eight. Custom
- Twenty-Nine. Parity
- Thirty. Fortune
- III: Volta
- Thirty-One. Images
- Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
- Thirty-Three. Letters
- Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
- Thirty-Five. Love
- Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
- IV: Your Best Reader
- Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
- Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
- Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
- Forty. Détente
- Forty-One. Worlds
- Forty-Two. Recognition
- Forty-Three. Persistence
- Forty-Four. And Then
- Forty-Five. Mingling
- Forty-Six. You
- Forty-Seven. Persona
- Forty-Eight. Est et Non
- Forty-Nine. The Author
- Epilogue
- Afterword: The Libertine
- Acknowledgments
- About the Authors
Not the incident with the ice-skate blade she somehow fell on in a wet elevator one winter afternoon, ripping open the interior of her left cheek, staining her white gloves brown. Not the other unforced injuries to her face, the broken teeth and split lips, the black eyes and cut cheeks and lumps to the forehead, though she’s never broken a bone and has barely had so much as a cut anywhere else on her body. Not the year of shoplifting nor the year of dealing speed. Not the week of the gentle busboy she’d had unprotected sex with against a boulder in Central Park. Not the hellish lethargy she’d fallen into late freshman year of college, when she’d begun sending manic emails to professors she suspected of wanting to bed her, emails she later saw in her outbox but could not recall typing, nor the unsuccessful attempts to fail out of school, when her mother had called off plans for a third marriage because of her daughter’s “instability,” when Clare’s mother had wetly sobbed late one night in her newest loft that Clare was ruining Trudy Elwil’s renowned existence but that over Trudy’s dead body would Clare start seeing a psychiatrist. None of this. And certainly not the road trip Clare had taken alone at the end of sophomore year, when she’d briefly shared a hotel room with an electronics salesman in Las Vegas. None of these times. Not the stories of all the airplanes Clare has missed because of hearing voices, long before the accident, not that day at the Orsay, long before anything went wrong. Not the unforeseen accident itself. Clare does not care about the accident, and it will be far better to write about things that she does care about, at least a little, while pretending not to care about them, because in these cases you can pretend not to care. What you write has to be a choice, Clare thinks. You have to choose. You have to have something to do. It has to be work. It cannot be the truth.
Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
Thirty-Six
The Iceberg
Lizzie tells herself for the umpteenth time that she’s only practicing using binoculars, because what they never show you in movies is that it’s actually kind of hard to do! They don’t go into focus all that easily, and you never know when you could be invited to go on some sort of bird-watching safari by some very advanced boy you are likely to meet in college and then look like a total scrub when you can’t even make out whatever rare plover it is you’re meant to be stalking. In 2004, it is all about being well-rounded!