Megan Nolan Recommends Jeffrey Eugenides, John Irving, Oyinkan Braithwaite, and More March 8, 2021 In my cultural consumption I have always had a tendency to empathize with losers. Long before I knew anything of romantic love myself I was identifying with downtrodden suckers who yearn helplessly and are doomed to languish in the shadows. It’s little wonder that my first serious romantic incident was entirely one-sided, and was no less formative and vivid for being so. The object of my long lonely fixation was 16 to my 13, a gap which then felt as irreconcilable as a separating ocean. He was a sweet boy, gentle and kind even though it must have been mortifying for him to be followed around by an ungainly adolescent disfigured by visible adoration. He—of course—played guitar and his very cold blue eyes appeared always to be wincing in agony at the trials of existing in the world. That was a large part of what I loved him for, that he was in pain and uninterested in hiding it. What I imagined to be his poetic melancholy spoke to my own burgeoning teenage angst, made it seem interesting and meaningful and perhaps even beautiful.