“In the novel, at least the reassuring nineteenth-century novel, one was always privy to everyone’s well-lit motives and alerted to even the first sign of corruption. But in life — how could one navigate in an unnarrated world? Of course I was always narrating my life to myself (idea for novel), but unfortunately I had no access to the private thoughts of the other characters around me. Even my own mind was too prolific to be comprehensible. It was certainly true that I was fashioning the book of my life at all times, trying out sentences, sketching out plot lines, hoarding impressions, restaging the scenes I had just lived through … At every moment I convinced myself that I was gathering material for the novel of my life — all experienced from the philosophical distance of the author. Even these humiliating occasions when I was robbed could be used as material. Life was a field trip. My writing would turn all this evil into flowers.”

— Edmund White, “My Hustlers,” a short story from McSweeney’s Issue 18