When We Were Young

I read the whole thing, all 567 pages of Thomas Mallon’s The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983–1994, which surprised me, because once I got past the parts that I was in some way witness to, as a student of Mallon’s at Vassar College in the 1980s, I had expected to skim. I tried to skim. But the skimming never lasted long. And so, despite my best efforts at slothful reading, my attention kept getting snagged, on lines like:

“There are no bones in David Leavitt’s hand. It’s like shaking a chicken patty.”