Little Failure: A Memoir

Maybe this is who I really am. Not a loner, exactly. But someone who can be alone.

She folds the pages of the books she reads when she wants to remember something important. Her favorite books are accordions, testaments to an endless search for meaning.

I write because there is nothing as joyful as writing, even when the writing is twisted and full of hate, the self-hate that makes writing not only possible but necessary. I hate myself, I hate the people around me, but what I crave is the fulfillment of some ideal.

As every so-called creative spirit soon learns, the rest of the world doesn't particularly give a damn.

I want to be loved so badly, it verges on mild insanity.

You are not what you want. You are what wants you back.

I am not good with others.

I am born hungry. Ravenous. I want to eat the world, and I can never be satiated.

When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished'*--Czeslaw Milosz. *And, I might add, if the family isn't finished, then the writer is.

stockbrokers, secretaries, government functionaries—everybody back then was expected to have some kind of inner life.

I wonder what children whose parents have money think about in their spare time.

1979. Coming to America after a childhood spent in the Soviet Union is equivalent to stumbling off a monochromatic cliff and landing in a pool of pure Technicolor.

The goal of politics is to make us children. The more heinous the system the more this is true. The Soviet system worked best when its adults—its men, in particular—were welcomed to stay at the emotional level of not-particularly-advanced teenagers.

I am a kind of joke, but the question is: which kind? My job is to keep everyone guessing.

After all, this is America, and you can swap out the parts of yourself that don't work. You can rebuild yourself piece by piece.

Every moment I have ever experienced as a child is as important as every moment I am experiencing now, or will experience ever. I guess what I'm saying is that not everybody should have children.

Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there.

My mother cranes her neck. Her ability to be fascinated by things is her best gift to me.

The world is harsh and inconsiderate, and you can rely only on your family.

Let’s start with my surname: Shteyngart. A German name whose insane Sovietized spelling, eye-watering bunching of consonants (just one i between the h and t and you got some pretty nice “Shit” there), and overall unattractiveness has cost me a lot of human warmth. “Mr., uh, I can’t pronounce this … Shit … Shit … Shitfart?” the sweet Alabama girl at reception giggles. “Is, uh, a single bed okay for you?” What do you think, honey, I want to say. Do you think a Shitfart gets to share a bed?

And between them I am rosy cheeked, aflame with health and joy. I am still the owner of the same stupid Soviet polka-dot shirt, but most of it is hidden by a new Italian sweater, its shoulders ringed with something like epaulets, so that I may continue the fantasy that I will join the Red Army someday. My hair is as long and unruly as the Italian state, and the gap between my crooked teeth is its own opera, but the rings under my eyes that have made such an underaged raccoon out of me are gone.

Power is not a means, Vinston; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” I

My mother is changing history. She is making her balalaika-smashing mother into a heroine. Does she want me to do the same for her? Is that what good children do for their parents? What about good writers?

There, I was ridiculed for being an inauthentic American, and now I am being charged with being an inauthentic Russian. I do not yet understand that this very paradox is the true subject of so-called immigrant fiction.

The past is haunting us. In Queens, in Manhattan, it is shadowing us, punching us in the stomach. I am small, and my father is big. But the Past—it is the biggest.

Just don’t write like a self -hating Jew,” my father is whispering into my ear.

The simple trill of her laugh has not declined over the years; if anything it's been buffeted by her endless sorrows and disappointments.

The truth is this: The rich will rule even at a place like Oberlin, where their kind is technically forbidden. They will simply invert the power structure to suit their needs. They will come out on top no matter what. Stuyvesant was hard but hopeful; Oberlin, on the other hand, reminds me yet again how the world works. I guess that's why they call it an education.

This red-fading-into-brown defines Queens for me; it is quiet and melancholy and postsuccessful, vaguely British in its disposition.

In America, the distance between wanting something and having it delivered to your living room is not terribly great.