illennials seem doomed to generational warfare: without the organisations and categories that once sought to treat the problem of inequality on its distinct, class-based terms, a fight between generations is now the only plausible option. The irony is that the increasing salience of generational categories provides a sociology for a world that has become less sociological: when all other forms of affiliation and belonging have become weak, generational divides are bound to resurface as a last resort. Together with race, gender, or ethnic background, generational markers imply a crisis of collective life rather than a remedy for it. As Mannheim himself never forgot, the persistence of generational thinking means that humanity hasn’t fully liberated itself from biology: the struggle between generations, in this sense, is just another instance of the struggle of species.

Weekends we drink forties on the flatbed of Edwin’s stepdad’s blue pickup. Behind the 7/11 after dark, anything is possible. The we’s always me, Edwin, and whatever collection of shitheads decide to gather that particular evening. I say shitheads but mean only boys. I say boys and mean some kind of mollusk, hard-shelled with tender meat inside. We get the beer with Edwin’s fake – says he’s from Iowa, twenty-nine, and his newly grown mustache offers a little wink. I use the money from my allowance, even though he’s got more, and we sit and drink until the police are called or we get bored.

These nights are endless, years blended into a stretch of asphalt, into Olde English bottles smashed into showers of light, into shadowboxing as our shadows cast huge kissing shapes below the parking lot’s uniform sodium streetlamps. And Edwin smirks through all this like nothing could possibly touch him unless he invites it. Timid grin, fat lower lip, thick eyebrows below his midnight-blue Yankees cap. At night in bed, when there is only my dark ceiling looking down at me, his face floats there, taking up the whole faux stucco surface, unnaturally big, eyes like two dimming headlights, his mouth a car door opening as if to say: Get in, queer, doesn’t matter where we’re going, I’m driving.

At the last protest before my last protest I grow nauseated by the pageantry – the photo-op signage, the 300 dollar jackets with political slogans pre-sewn-in, the mind-numbingly repetitive chanting. Maybe the problem is that I understand too well. This is a salve for practitioners and the easily sated. Supermarket sheet cake for the choir. We’re gathered outside one of the president’s many towers, a handful of barricades have been prearranged for us to march in circles inside. We are yelling in this penned-in section of fencing while traffic moves freely around us, demanding justice as business goes on undisturbed. And even as we say these same words over and over, it’s clear we each have different definitions of what justice, and freedom, and power mean. What I know for sure is any word repeated enough ends up meaning nothing.

A group of friends ask me to take their picture. They’re laughing until the lens is trained on them and then, behind their signs, they make serious and severe faces for the internet. One of the girls compliments my anti-cop shirt (which I bought on Amazon) but not my makeup (which I stole from Sephora). There are official cameras surveilling us. The cameras stand in for police while the actual police sip free coffee in their cruisers.

To be here is to be alone surrounded by people – at once watched and invisible. Over these two hours we keep inquiring what democracy looks like, who owns these streets, and whether, if the people are united will they ever be defeated? The answers to me are clearly: not this, not us, we’re not, and, inevitably, we will be. The demonstration ends after about the length of a movie, and everyone goes home feeling better – as if we’ve done something, as if something’s been done.

I go home sick. Throw up my Burger King into the toilet. Check Twitter to see the protest trending for a moment, then gone.

I know exactly what you mean when you say your ex-husband was a writer and editor and your current partner is not, and that this works much better, allowing you space. After my first marriage, I was never again attracted to literary or even especially intellectual men. I went for visual artists. I wanted my literary and intellectual life to be my own. I think it’s important that you note the difference in occupation. Ambitious, intelligent young women tend to overvalue a mate who does the same work, but it’s more likely a liability. A contemporary version of Dorothea Brooke and Mr Casaubon.

A good first marriage is luck. A good second marriage should not be. The overall tone of Parallel Lives, its attitude toward marriage, derives from my own experience as a young woman discovering that the person I thought was autonomous, me, once I got married, no longer was. I was part of a couple. That is a brutal transition in life. I was too inexperienced to know at that age what kind of person would satisfy my emotional needs over the long haul. I hoped then and still hope that Parallel Lives might help other people make this transition, with a greater understanding of the dynamics of couples.

But I feel I am avoiding the direct thrust of your question: is something lost or gained by sticking with the personal, resisting sublimation as you put it. You do gain great power by rising above the personal. One of the most abused battle cries of my generation was ‘The personal is political’. This has led to an ocean of banalities in public life – politics and journalism both – so that it seems every speech, every investigative article, must begin with a personal narrative. The personal is political only if you are a good enough writer or a good enough politician to make it so. If you want to know just how boring the personal can be, hang out with old people. It is one of the great tragedies of aging that just as every detail of every experience you’ve had in your life becomes precious to you, you have probably lost the ability to make it interesting to anyone else not assigned you as a school research project. You are desperate to tell your story, but your story, to your listeners, is ‘the past’, a place in which they have only polite interest or which they will mine for their own art. And that is how it should be.

Thank you so much, Sheila. Between us, something else was just occurring to me. Here again, the difference in our ages comes into play. At a certain point, legality is no longer the issue. Neither is love. I no longer wear my wedding ring, to signal something not to others (that I’m available) but to myself (that my husband is gone, even if I’m the only one who knows it). At ninety-eight, he is just not the man I married when he was in his sixties. He has dementia and is more a remnant than a person. Still, I am morally and practically responsible for him. We’ve transcended the legal and the emotional and reached a level of pure commitment. It’s true for him, too. I am the only person who exists in his world. I am certain there are many other elderly people in similar situations, mostly with the women having to take care of the men. I don’t know how the saintly people we see in movies and read about in memoirs do it!

[...] I was all limbs and acne at seventeen, all Church of England schooling, stripey ties and busy sexuality. The point of life was to bunn parental opinion. I also had a sense that another form of inheritance could be gotten elsewhere. In books, cinema, music – Woolf, Beckett, the Wu-Tang Clan, Bresson and Scorsese. Anything my parents offered seemed overcast with conservatism. Perhaps all that tradition and religion felt worth holding on to for them. For me, it only meant everything needed to be fought over, defied, and then dramatically renounced. I kept pushing away, and my parents feared I’d forget them. Why you have to be so different to other boys? It forced a distance that threatened to become irreparable.

The door always creaked like it was in pain when you opened it and slammed shut when you closed it. It made the small break room feel extra quiet and empty. He stood a moment in the echo of the door and tried to think about what he could have done better. Might have done better. He tried to think about what sort of person he wanted to be in this world and how he might bring that about. His doctor told him that he could only control his actions and not the feelings of others. But the kind of person that Per wanted to be was the kind of person who elicited from other people predictable, good feelings.

The cart had some poetry on it too, things picked up, read snickeringly and then set aside. Some people confused reading and literature – they supposed that these two things had a great deal to do with each other. This made for a lot of confusion because it prompted people to believe that reading was somehow the sort of behavior that was inherently good in a moral sense. When in fact the moral value assigned to reading had to do with the creation of the idea of literature, which some people imbued with all the solemnity of the holy when in fact it was a middlebrow bourgeois anachronism created in universities and retroactively applied to some of the greatest works of human history. In that way, reading and literature were the same. Yet in today’s world, reading had diverged even from these modest middlebrow origins and had sunk into some horribly populist activity.

A modern bookstore was perhaps the greatest example of this kind of fallacy. There were no true believers of this new religion, only empty-headed evangelists flogging the idea that all reading was good reading and that anything could count as reading, and anything could be literature, and that any reading was in fact reading literature and therefore morally unassailable, and in this way not merely morally good but also aesthetically good. There could never be a true faithful to such an empty string of logical transformations. Who could ever earnestly go on their knees in the quiet and the dark of their human soul and raise their face up and say to the vast and unknowable gods of that quiet inner darkness, Any reading is good reading.