“…Nothing prospered across the land / Until she came out of her trance.”

“To sew a jacket, one must first imagine it fragmented.”

“It’s in making note of the variety of seemingly timeless strategies used by rising authoritarian regimes to create fissures in the foundations of democratic governments that cause them eventually to crumble.”

The want to write about Tully is really about knowing so many vets and witnessing their suffering. I write about it by talking to the men who I am close to who have served.

To further the comparison between the two texts, certain thematic valences notwithstanding, Chapman’s debut is an all but negative image of Gessen’s sophomore effort—disjunctive where Gessen’s narrative is straight ahead; knowing and bawdy and essentially unconcerned with portraying human relationships at any great length.