How Form Can Distort Reality

...some of the academics want to write like they're writing for The New Yorker, and The New Yorker does so many wonderful things, but I think The New Yorker has also convinced us all that we need to find one perfect avatar that embodies the complex story we want to tell, and we have to start and end with this character, and this character has to somehow go through in this Forrest Gump-like way all the major milestones of the history we want to get out of our pens. But just like Forrest Gump, nobody is a perfect avatar, and while we want to make things accessible by humanizing them and telling stories, the problem with that is that it then collapses the story to an individual experience, when even an individual doesn't experience the same thing the same way each time they experience it.

-- Michael S. Kideckel, during a 2021 interview by Brian Hamilton for the New Books Network