I’m sitting in my new friend’s room at her grandparents’ house overlooking Washington Square Park. She writes poems; I ask her why she’s feeling underappreciated. She takes a pill, and says, quite seriously, “You know there’s this feeling in New York that, like, I’m just going to be an insider secret.” I don’t think that, I say. “Yes! Yes, you do think that,” she says evenly. “You think I’m going to be a person that only people in the know know.”

“Sometimes I feel like an art handler,” Rachel says, of other people. “You know, a little to the left. Better.”

I spilled a vodka soda on Philip Roth at one of those New York Public Library galas. I did it on purpose. I feel like he resented it. I know because he said, “I resent this.”