Lithium for Medea

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Some books are made for the young. They are not foreshortened to reach the young, nor made prurient with special attention to the habits and strategies of youth. But these books speak particularly well to how it feels to be young and to be faced with the imminent desperation of full-grown adulthood. Everyone has his own list of such works. Everyone has the books he or she first encountered like a victim of shipwreck coming across that buoyant hunk of driftwood. These reading experiences are delicious, essential, impossible to forget. I remember, in college, encountering Murphy by Samuel Beckett, in a freshman English class, and feeling like I had turned up a long-lost relative. Or first reading Sam Shepard’s plays, or first glimpsing the work of the Beats. Naked Lunch, “Howl,” and so on. The first novel I read by Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49. James Thurber’s stories. Dorothy Parker. Lydia Davis.

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