White Noise
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Some people are readers and others are re-readers, and while I used to fall squarely in the latter camp, at some point I became firmly ensconced in the former. This shift has been helpful in moving through the never-ending, ever-growing list of Books I Have Been Meaning to Get to, though I often gaze longingly at the ones I haven’t touched in years, yet once knew well enough to call my favorite. And this is how I ended up revisiting Don DeLillo’s White Noise.
I remembered only the briefest whisper of plot, but was reminded very quickly why I loved it—it’s so dark and deadpan about mortality and midlife (see also: consumerism, relationships, and the stories we tell ourselves to live). Did I really have a handle on these things at age 23; could I have fully appreciated the humor? Did it make me feel seen, or did reading it—over and over and again—just make me feel smart and literary?
For two decades I’ve viscerally recalled that DeLillo’s Babette “had important hair.” I've been replaying the final moments of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty for nearly as long, and “We must relinquish the dead” from The Year of Magical Thinking has, at times, qualified as an intrusive thought. But upon each recent re-read, these pocketed scraps of other people's stories did not offer a lens into my own; the finer details of who I was at time of impact have faded into some combination of “beside the point” and “none of my business.”
A song is an infinitely more portable artifact of youth, and not dissimilar to a time machine in its ability to jolt you headlong into a beach-bound car’s passenger seat, or onto the trundle bed of a high school sleepover. Longer form narratives function more like time capsules—their contents are open to interpretation and shifts in nuance; allegiances to characters (and all other truths inherent) very much subject to who you are and what you know when you dig them back up. And let it not go without saying—should you crave the emotional wreckage of both delivery systems, I’d suggest scheduling a formal check-in with Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide.”
It helps me romanticize the moment at hand if I believe that this, right now, is the version of myself most worth remembering, but in doing so I rob my 20-something self of a certain amount of credit. Sure, she chain-smoked Camel Ultra-Lights and thought she was “too self-aware for therapy,” but then: Babette has important hair. Hendrickje bathes. Didion walks plainly through hell. What younger-me lacked in self-awareness she more than made up for in prescience, and in each catalogued non sequitur she was forming taste, establishing beliefs, and somehow, miraculously, recognizing every future iteration of us—ever-changing in context; a single narrative in the constant and (virtuously) inefficient state of unfolding
“White Noise” emailed out 3.17.2026 with newsletter-exclusive extras. Subscribe for free here.