It’s difficult for me to select just one passage from this brilliantly written collection of essays by Siri Hustvedt. Her prose is piercingly honest but is somehow delivered with a velvety quality. I can’t get enough of this book’s fluid intensity, especially in the last two heartbreaking essays. But I’m choosing an excerpt from an essay called “Living Thing”, which resonated with me and speaks to my ongoing interest in confrontations with vanishing points, liminality, and the relationship between presence and absence:

“Memory is another form of presence, more fragile than immediate perception, akin to dream and hallucination and prone to distortion” (187).