(no subject)
Finished Miranda July's "The First Bad Man". I thought I was losing the thread of the story in the middle where the heights of intense sexually-charged awkwardness/discomfort/strangeness were reached, entirely comparable to several cringey scenes in "Me and You and Everyone We Know" --- but I think in retrospect they are integral to the whole piece. It is saying something potent, I come to think, about adolescence, and about the extended growing-up that follows it, learning to cope with growth, change, disappointment, loss --- about how every such change is experienced, necessarily, as the first time that particular, peculiar change is experienced. Am I supposed to feel, react, suffer, enjoy, be bewildered in this way?