When discussing Eimear McBride’s new novel The City Changes Its Face, we could start with the Jonathan Franzen/Ben Marcus tete-a-tete that occurred two decades ago, when the “make it accessible,”

Because the trembling lashes are ready / Cuz the door cracks like a whip

We started off as strangers,
you and I.
And I’ll always wonder -
if there had been others
would I have picked you?
Your brothers were already gone
by the time I got there
so I paid for

Why the fuck would a seventeen-year-old girl from Akron, Ohio say something like that? Why would that even be in her repertoire?

Six-thirty in the morning on this, the thirty-fourth birthday to pass, and there’s metal scraping against metal outside the window. A screech heard over fake rain blaring from the noise machine and

One grotesque morning, our friend Dani—frequent companion in cocaine-fueled escapades—stumbled from the spare room, blacked-out, around sunrise.

It is Winter again. I am not myself.

Cherry nausea tablets dissolve under my tongue every morning, ostensibly tricking my mind from dry-heaving, and sleeping requires triple the dosage of Trazodone

I draw the line at unboxing videos.

This is what we tell ourselves about places like this: that they belong only to a certain New York, a New York of discrete transactions and brass plaques reading “Jeffrey E. Epstein Corporation.”

But even when I felt ashamed for liking her, I also saw her as somehow supernaturally chosen for me. She rejected me from the moment we met. 

I love idiots. Or at least some of them anyway.

One of the most profound aesthetic experiences of my life involved falling asleep in an armchair in the middle of the afternoon while reading The Fairie Queene. I did not dream of Britomart and Sir

I wanted to see if I could pass as someone who belongs.

Alright, Mariely, Jelly Belly.  Pretend you are a person who has friends. You can send this text message. It’s fine. They don’t know you

Me sitting down before a cheesecake factory menu
and seeing only letters.
Me fucking without even a hair as much the enjoyment
I get from a waffle--

Junah at the End of the World is about, well, Junah, a twelve-year old boy going through the uncertainty of Y2K. It’s funny to look back at that time and to think about how different things were, to

What was I supposed to do on Friday nights when there was nothing to celebrate?

That day I let him touch me in his car on the side of the train tracks outside of town.

Do not follow your child too closely. Hovering makes it look like something might go wrong, which of course it might, but the point of these events is to pretend it won’t. Maintain a five-foot buffer

Her favorite video was one of a girl getting fucked during a Zoom meeting.

  At six years old, I wanted to be a boy. I cut my hair short. I wore blue shorts. I ran around with my shirt off. I threw oranges at my sister and her friends.

No one has dared come to my front door. No one has dared to meet me face to face. 

 Peter does not center himself as an influencer-writer-genius producing work so insular few can relate. Instead, he masterfully turns the tables.

At that point her father filled the rooms with firearms. Instead of a house tour Lizzie liked to give friends the glock safari.

“He copied and pasted your text and sent it to me.” I rephrased it.

They always share their worst secrets with me and look to me for female forgiveness.

On the television, Paul Hollywood is doling out handshakes - I'd settle for eye contact from my husband-