It’s a strange experience, reading a book and feeling like I’m reading someone else’s life. Usually I find myself in many of the books I read – not in all of them and not even in all of the ones that strike me hardest, but generally I read myself into books and read myself out of them, find my own experiences in their words and find also that the words articulate my own experiences in unfamiliar ways. So it’s basically all about me, this act of reading, as I look for ways to rethink my life. The range of the books I feel this way about – from Zadie Smith’s White Teeth to Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa – indicate just how vague, however visceral, those connections are.

But this is the first time – that I can remember, so I may be wrong – that I’m reading a book and feeling like I’m reading a friend’s life and not my own. It’s not that Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao mimics my friend’s life in any specific way, but the tone, from its very opening passages, was so startlingly familiar that it threw me off.
So instead of myself I started to read him into it.

This is a new kind of presumption for me to practise. Easily debilitated by the presumption of writing about anyone’s life except my own, now I feel uncomfortable with how much I presume in reading my friend into this book, my friend whose life, because not my own, is alien to me. He’d recognise immediately, if he read this book, why it makes me think so much of him, but he’d also be rightly sensitive to the ways that this book is not his life at all and it would make him understandably uncomfortable, to say the least, to think of me being unable to distinguish between voice and content, tone and chronology, this foreign and fictional construct and his real and living self.

Knowing that, I feel uncomfortable with myself.

I don’t want to presume. I don’t want my perceptions of my friend to be based, however obscurely, on my having read this book. That’s not fair to him. More than that, it’d be an invasion of his privacy. Which is precisely why I continue reading this book, though it discomfits me to intrude in this way – even if the intrusion is entirely in my head. I need to get to its end so that I can dismiss the specificities of its narratives as unreal, as purely fictional, as irrelevant.
It’s a huge risk to run because, thirty pages in, every few paragraphs I have to step back and catch myself. However much I enjoy reading this book, the subconscious interpretive work I’m doing is indefensible.

It’s good that I’m having this experience, though. Uncomfortable as I am with the act of writing, where now everything I write feels like an invasion of someone else’s privacy, it makes sense that that tension translates into the act of reading. They’re so interconnected, these two ways of being with words, that if my anxieties didn’t transfer from one mode to the next, it would be because I’d grown too comfortable somewhere and was taking words for granted.

Still, ethical dilemmas aside, claiming presumption is so often just debilitating, often just an excuse to vegetate and do nothing productive. Pleading existential crises gets tired quickly.

It’s perfectly fine if you don’t believe in these “superstitions.” In fact, it’s better than fine – it’s perfect. Because no matter what you believe, fukú believes in you.