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

“It’s so nice just to be normal,” she’d told me a few months earlier, when I returned from London. In high school, we’d not wanted to be normal. We’d made fun of the normal people. We’d hated them.
“I know,” I said reflexively, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to be normal. I wanted to be extraordinary. I wanted to write novels and make films and speak ten languages and travel around the world. I wanted everything. So, I’d thought, had Jenny.