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
Lizzie thinks that maybe every adult in America has seen Titanic and realized they need to hurry and find their Leonardo DiCaprio before the total flowering of the apocalypse. The way her mother is looking into the air now as the sun begins to set makes Lizzie think of how Kate Winslet looks when she takes off all her clothes to pose for Leonardo DiCaprio, even though Billy Zane could show up at any second. In that moment, when she’s naked, posing, Kate Winslet doesn’t give a fuck if Billy Zane suddenly shows up, because she’s busy making herself truly vulnerable to another human being for the very first time in her life, and there is something strong in that, and this is something that Billy Zane’s character could never take away from her. Anyway, it’s like this is, weirdly, what her mother is doing, even though she’s not naked and is only talking on the phone while flirting with pneumonia.
She kind of looks vulnerable. It is intense.
It’s particularly weird because when Lizzie’s mom first started telling Lizzie about how maybe two people can love each other very much but still not be right for each other in the long run, Lizzie didn’t want to believe it, and she was probably kind of mean to her mom for saying that at the time. Lizzie thought that her parents really loved each other and were happy. This shows how much Lizzie knows.