Joanna Rakoff

This was 1996. The country was in the grips of a recession. Almost no one I knew was gainfully employed. My friends were in grad school—getting MFAs in fiction or PhDs in film theory—or working at coffee shops in Portland, or selling T-shirts in San Francisco, or living with their parents on the Upper West Side. A job, an actual nine-to-five job, was an almost alien concept, an abstraction.

I didn’t want to be entertained. I wanted to be provoked