I’ve Forgotten Almost Everything I’ve Ever Read

Here’s (some of) what stuck.

High school; Sophocles and Death of a Salesman; confusing a perfect score for self-worth

Big anthology blocks, theory in sections like Battenberg; subject and object; self and other; each new ‘ism’ a door

To The Lighthouse*; wow, modernism; returning ten years later to undimmed beauty

John Berger’s Ways of Seeing; looking is not neutral

Sniffing at her love for Marian Keyes, an early lesson in wrongness

Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui; so that’s what you call it

Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life; mould on her bedroom wall

The first fifteen pages of Infinite Jest, on the bus somewhere (jury duty?)

Birthday presents in the park, unwrapping Dollimore’s Sexual Dissidence; she got the address of my favourite academic and he wrote an encouraging note on the title page; later, sawing the joint bookcase in half like Solomon’s child because I stopped learning how to see

In the library at 2am to avoid anyone I knew; hounded, disintegrating, ripping phone lines out of sockets; sentences taste like sand