The undocumented immigrants who died on 9/11 worked in restaurants, in housekeeping, in security. They were also deliverymen. The 9/11 Memorial and Museum now stands where the Twin Towers once stood. They have an exhibit that gutted me when I saw it. It’s a bicycle, presumed to have belonged to a deliveryman, a bike that was left tied to a pole near the Twin Towers. Visitors to the site had left acrylic flowers — red, white, and blue roses and carnations. They also left a rosary on the bicycle. It became a makeshift memorial. There was a note on the street next to the bike: EN MEMORIA DE LOS DELIVERY BOYS QUE MURIERON. SEPT 11 2001. “In memory of the delivery boys who died.” Delivery boys. That’s how I know it was the delivery boys who put up that sign, who left those acrylic flowers, men like my dad.

I wonder what the bike owner brought to the Twin Towers that day. It was September, a mild day, so maybe an iced coffee. Black. Probably a scone. Maybe a $4.50 breakfast. A 15 percent tip would be sixty-seven cents. A 20 percent tip would be ninety cents. A generous person might tip a dollar. My father would travel anywhere for a dollar. My father would chase a dollar down the road, a dollar blowing in the winds of a hurricane, even when there was an equal likelihood of getting swept up by the wind. My dad would always take the chance. A dollar is a dollar.

All I had were words, but I had no warmth to infuse them with. I felt I had nowhere else to go but satire. Satire shares something with empathy, but it’s a contorted relationship. Maybe they’re stepsiblings. They’re forced to live together, but satire spends all its time bullying empathy. The first version of Class had a big satire problem. Since all I felt was sadness and loneliness, and guilt about the pleasures of traveling and partying, and also about the way literature had provided a way away from my family and that specific church across that specific street, I retreated to my French literature gods—Proust, Maupassant, Zola, Balzac, Flaubert—and chose to make fun of society. Fucking society! I crushed those characters and their mannerisms. I didn’t know what else I could do.

But where people could relate to Alessandro’s novel, they couldn’t relate to mine. There’s a clunkiness to my writing that comes from a loneliness so extreme it never manages to warm up. I don’t suffer like a poet, I suffer like an office clerk. The second part of the novel offered no comforting hugs to anyone, nor did it provide any explanation of or knowledge about the impotent, Catholic anti-Semite at its center. The flamboyance of the style was an implicit promise to the publisher—and the foreign publishers—that their money would be earned back. But it was only style, and style is never enough.

One time, I was interviewed on satellite television by a pair of good-looking 25-year-old hosts who asked me: What’s it like to have it made? Their anxious tone betrayed a lack of confidence you rarely see on TV. It was so strange to see people that young, working in broadcast media, projecting such intense feelings of dread. An interview is all about the hustle—it’s the awkward pursuit of those elusive moments when the interviewer suddenly feels (and this happens to me, too, when I’m the one holding the recorder) that they’ve captured something good, something that will lead to an uptick in their reputation. I could tell that for the interviewers and the young writers who were watching, Class was a major bummer. It reminded them that the hustle was ridiculous in the midst of the hustle itself. And still they couldn’t stop, because what else could they do? Everybody their age assumed they were going to try and fail. This made me realize I’d written something more horrifying than I’d planned. The younger readers saw beyond the petulant mannerisms of my characters and made me realize that what the novel was really about was how those characters had no choice.

This second, English version of Class had the same structure as the first, and I don’t think I took out any scenes, but it felt very different anyway. It came out in the US and got good reviews, and Dwight Garner put it on his year-end list in the Times. I was so happy! I had lost money on this book (the unpaid translation and the tiny advance), but Garner’s praise, and Christian Lorentzen’s review in New York, were what I needed to keep going. In the end I’ll find the money to pay for my need to write. I’m desperate. I’m like them—like my characters. I don’t care. The following may not make sense, but to me it truly doesn’t matter if I get my money from my wife, my parents, the Italian encyclopedia where I work, or from you, my motherfucking readers. I hate you! I just need the money, because if I don’t write these nightmares I will die.

I hate what you are feeling right now. You are not seeing the breakdowns and the panic and the days we spend in bed with the curtains down. Authors show off their empathy and what the readers see is glamour. I hate all of this.

I now saw before me the profound depth of my dissatisfaction with what the market and the publishing industry do to authors. The industry makes us forget that we got here because we couldn’t make sense of things, we couldn’t just pick up whatever shared sense of reality we were taught in school, in church, on TV. We needed to create our own, detailed reality. But then the industry makes you hurry up and go ahead, eager for you to craft a career for yourself, instead of a history.

“My father lives with another wife,” Murad, 26, explained to me in April 2019, “so I live with my mother in one room.” His family’s shack is on the shabby edge of Gaza City, the toilet separated from the eating, sleeping, and living areas by only a thin curtain. There is no kitchen, just a small gas stove, but after Murad’s injury there was little to cook. Before Murad was shot on May 14, 2018, he used to make 20 NIS, or $5.80, a day as a self-taught electrician. He has not worked since his injury, and the aid he receives from the authorities isn’t enough to keep him and his mother afloat. The help offered to him by his family has been scant. “I can only afford to buy biscuits,” he said. “Last night we just ate stale bread for dinner. We have nothing. We’ve not had gas for a month.”

If we conjure the political will to create socialized medicine under the argument that health care is a human right, what forms of becoming gendered will be covered? To say that only bottom surgery would qualify is to reinscribe precisely our enemies’ reductive biopolitics of genital obsession. But what if becoming woman is a process not simply of jumping across a gendered binary, but one constantly occurring within gender itself? Do we then lean into or out of the medicalization of the gendered body? Do we have a right to be hot? Why should the socialist state cover one woman’s acquisition of breasts and not another’s augmentation of them? What is the space of nonequivalence between these two visions of “rights,” the right to purchase a commoditized medical service and the rights of an individual within a sociopolitical collectivity? If the welfare state is staked on the ethical wager that the plastic body is sponsored by the collectivity to help realize a collective vision of the good, what is the relation between rights and desires? And if the body is not private property to be managed as an investment, then how do we relate to it?

[...] There was Bernie Sanders, a socialist from a Brooklyn immigrant family who does not appear in Romance. He became the mayor of a small city in Vermont, then a senator, and finally ran twice for President. “I have cast some lonely votes, fought some lonely fights, mounted some lonely campaigns,” he wrote in 2015. “But I do not feel lonely now.” I don’t feel lonely anymore, but it isn’t nearly enough. An infinite amount of care seems necessary. While we gather our strength, the lucky ones among us will grow old.