“RECOGNITION”: LATE NIGHT, MAUDLIN STREET. So, I wrote a thing. It’s about… hrm. It’s about identity formation; homosexuality; children; grace; what constitutes a happy ending; and what we can know or assume or understand about other people. It’s short (one-shot), and it’s here. And maybe it should really have been an essay. I feel like it’s too polemical to be fiction and too obsessive to be journalism. Anyway, I doubt this is its final form. So your comments, questions, criticisms are, as always, more than welcome.

One caution: This piece probably has more obviously autobiographical details and turns of phrase than most of my fiction. There are two big honking reasons I use details from my own experience, and they’re more or less diametrically opposed:
a. Something I experienced strikes me as an especially powerful representation of something I believe to be true about the world. Experience as elective affinity, if you like.
b. I’m writing about an experience that isn’t my own, and in order to ensure some degree of verisimilitude, I use details from my own experience.
So, in other words, if you happen to recognize a detail or even a set of details, please don’t conclude that the narrative in which those details appear is taken from my own experience.