The work began as an organizing system—an attempt to make sense of the last twenty years, what they have amounted to, and what was gained and lost in the meantime. The title circled my mind for a decade. I always knew I wanted to write it, but first I had to—somehow—justify the name. 

 

The essays were written over several years, most of them beginning as erratic notes and observations. The first essay, Lost in Eastern Europe, was an attempt to write honestly about my adolescence, marked by exile, shock, depression, and dislocation. It’s a story about growing up between two unbridgeable worlds: the exuberant horizon of the West and the darkness of the East.

 

​Each essay moves through the usual tension—vanity and vulnerability, intellect and passion, illusion and truth. This theme of opposites has had a way of repeating itself in my life. I wanted to understand how the very things that break us—loss, fracture, despair—conspire together to design a life. How they become inflection points of self-creation. I also wanted to regain some essence, a thread that survived the revisions—the part of me that remained whole, unchanged.​​

 

Lastly, I wanted to write about the education no one gives you. Like surviving Manhattan without life experience, or running as an exorcism, or getting the body of Gisele while also reading the Classics. But also humor, compassion, irony, movies, music, style, and dinner parties—small devices of survival that make the comedy of life just a bit more bearable. 

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It is a sad book in places, tempered by explosive moments of laughter and a totally irrational, totally unyielding confidence in one's own destiny.