THE BELIEVER: What’s it like spending all this time mining your adolescence to find the hardest, darkest, maybe the funniest stories? Is this a way of purging these experiences? Or making sense of them?

LAUREN WEINSTEIN: Even if you’re pulling up old memories, they’re completely unreliable. I remember running into this guy before our ten-year high-school reunion. He said, “Oh, man, what really destroyed high school for me was that I could never date anyone because I wrote that really bad, hyperconservative op-ed piece about how women should be barefoot and tied to the stove.” And I thought, That’s not why no one dated you. But that was his story. In general, everyone’s got their own issues in high school, and they’re not such a big deal to other people.

Labels: Charles Burns, Lauren R. Weinstein, The Believer