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You think it’s a book or a shirt or a ticket-stub-cocktail-napkin-scrap-of-paper but it is, in fact, a biography; little bios everywhere when you look around your room and when you get dressed and when you find said ticket-stub-cocktail-napkin-scrap-of-paper in the pocket of those jeans,
The pair that reminds you of a solo trip to Joshua Tree, where you wore them sitting cross-legged on a large, flat rock. It was unearthly quiet, sky and desert unfurling, and you remember thinking you were maybe supposed to feel humbled by the sheer expansiveness of the landscape but instead it made you feel big, like a person with a purpose and a predestination, and later, when that nice German woman and her children offered you some of their salad to go with the takeaway pizza you were eating in the courtyard of the motel you were all staying at, you accepted and shared slices and felt one with humankind. This was itself a warm and fuzzy feeling, but the desert was colder than you thought it would be and you wished you’d brought your leather jacket,
The one you bought in your early 20s when you worked retail, worn soft by two decades of wanton disregard for its life (and probably yours as well), during which it was balled up behind DJ booths and stuffed into every iteration of purse Urban Outfitters had on offer and more than once used as a pillow. It is miraculous that it was never lost, but where would it have gone, really, who would have loved it more, with whom would it have had more fun? You did eventually gain a recognizance and respect for your material goods in a way your youth could have never predicted, when, out of pure boredom and likely no small appetite for destruction, you’d throw clothes into the air for the ceiling fan to catch and fling, leaving them where they landed until once again required for wear, because kids are weird and cool and always testing the physics of their world,
Which you learned, post-college, during that long-term substitute teaching placement covering for a middle-school librarian out on extended medical leave. Your job was to sit at the panopticon of the check-out desk (where you witnessed, among other things, physics/strictures/social hierarchies challenged within each 45-minute class period); you spent your tenure reading the Gossip Girl series in full before starting in on all things Lemony Snicket, and the gig ended just as you were finishing the twelfth novel of A Series of Unfortunate Events. This required immediate purchase of the thirteenth and final installment, aptly titled The End, and you wept so hard upon completion that it made your stomach hurt. It now lives on the “special” shelf alongside:
One (1) copy of The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, the cover of which you tore off in a fit of embarrassment before moving in with your first live-in boyfriend, because at age 18 you’d scrawled Counting Crows lyrics in blue pen across the inside (And all at once / you look across a crowded room / and see the way that light / attaches to a girl”) and the thought of someone else knowing how deeply you'd once been Duritzed made you feel mentally and physically unwell. Finding yourself unable to part ways with the Lisbon sisters entirely, you instead placed the cover in the trashcan—which is honestly where you should have also placed the whole “let’s move in together” conversation, but you live and you learn, you know? Next up:
Three (3) quasi-falling-apart copies of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, An Introduction (1963), which were the crux of your undergrad seminar paper on Salinger’s works, during the writing of which you learned a great deal about yourself, mainly that after several thousand words you were left wandering the great woods of your mind, a space so large that it made you feel small, argument and/or thesis lost if there ever was one to begin with. This at least felt appropriate in a Seymour Glass kind of way; from a searching-for-meaning-and-also-purpose-in-general angle; with a wow, I-really-have-no-predestination-at-all sort of certainty; and this is why you now only write short-form. And lastly,
One (1) copy of Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry by Leanne Shapton, which turned your brain inside out at what a book and a story could be, and how telling said story could really take any form you wanted it to and no one could say anything about it, including but very much not limited to immortalizing the stories and context held by your books and jackets and ticket-stubs-cocktail-napkins-scraps-of-paper; tangible little biographies that someone really should be writing down—and if not you, then who?
“Little Bios Everywhere” emailed out 11.10.2026 with newsletter-exclusive extras. Subscribe for free here.