If you don't leave home you suffocate, if you go too far you lose oxygen. - Vivian Gornick

I want to dramatise it not moralise over it. I didn't want to lecture or keep pointing things out to the reader, which is what a polemic does.

One's own best self. For centuries, this was the key concept behind any essential definition of friendship: that one's friend is a virtuous being who speaks to the virtue in oneself. How foreign such a concept to the children of the therapeutic culture! Today we do not look to see, much less affirm, our best selves in one another. To the contrary, it is the openness with which we admit to our emotional incapacities - the fear, the anger, the humiliation - that excites contemporary bonds of friendship. Nothing draws us closer to one another than the degree to which we face our deepest shame openly in one another's company... What we want is to feel known, warts and all: the more warts the better. It is the great illusion of our culture that what we confess to is who we are.

it’s my job as a writer to put the pieces together brilliantly. To put them all together so that they serve so well that I feel acutely the humanness of the situation as well as the politicalness of it.