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Zusatztext “Tim Kreider's heartfelt and funny memoir chronicles a series of attachments and love affairs. It both amuses and puts into perspective the realities of human love. Kreider has created a darkly wise book which may leave you feeling a little better about the world.” Informationen zum Autor Tim Kreider has written for The New York Times , The New Yorker , The Week , The Men’s Journal , and Nerve.com. His popular comic strip, The Pain—When Will It End? , ran in alternative weeklies for twelve years and has been collected in three books by Fantagraphics. He is the author of two collections of essays, We Learn Nothing and I Wrote This Book Because I Love You . He divides his time between New York City and an undisclosed location on the Chesapeake Bay. Klappentext "In the tradition of David Sedaris and David Foster Wallace, New York Times contributor Tim Kreider's second essay collection focuses on love, relationships, and why they're so bafflingly hard to get right"-- Leseprobe I Wrote This Book Because I Love You Oof I recently received an email that was about me, but wasn’t for me; I’d been cc’d by accident. This is one of the hazards of email, reason 697 why the Internet is Bad—the apocalyptic consequence of hitting REPLY ALL instead of REPLY. I had rented a herd of goats for reasons that aren’t relevant here, and had sent out a mass email with attached photographs of my goats to illustrate that (a) I had goats and (b) having goats was good. There turns out to be something primally satisfying about possessing livestock: a man wants to boast of his herd. Most respondents expressed appropriate admiration and envy of my goats, but the email in question, from my agent, was intended as a forward to some of her coworkers, sighing over the frivolous expenditures on which I was frittering away my advance. The word Oof was used. I’ve often thought that the single most devastating cyberattack a diabolical anarchic mind could devise would not be on the government, the military, or the financial sector, but simply to simultaneously make every email and text ever sent universally public. It would be like suddenly subtracting the strong nuclear force from the universe: the fabric of society would instantly disintegrate, every marriage, friendship, and business partnership dissolved. Civilization, held together by a fragile web of tactful phrasing, polite omissions, and benign lies, would self-destruct in a universal holocaust of bitter recriminations and weeping, breakups and fistfights, divorces, bankruptcies, scandals and resignations, blood feuds and litigation, wholesale slaughter in the streets, and lingering ill will. This particular email was, in itself, no big deal. Tone is notoriously easy to misinterpret online, and you could’ve read my friend’s message as affectionate headshaking rather than a contemptuous eye roll. It’s frankly hard to parse the word oof. And to be fair, I am terrible with money, unable to distinguish between any amounts other than $8.00 and $0.00: I always seem to have the former until suddenly and without warning it turns into the latter. But I like to think of this as an endearing foible, or at least no one else’s business, rather than imagine that it might be annoying—or, worse, boring—for my friends to have to listen to me bitch about the moribund state of the publishing industry and the digitization of literature while also watching me blow my advance on linen suits and livestock. What was surprisingly wounding wasn’t that the email was insulting but simply that it was unsympathetic. Hearing other people’s uncensored opinions of you is an unpleasant reminder that you’re...
