The Most Amazing Paragraph Ever

[walkitout]

I’m reading Rebecca Carroll’s _Surviving the White Gaze_, which is _extremely_ New Hampshire. Carroll was born within about a year of when I was born, so it’s easy to get most of the pop culture references (I do not recognize all of the dance moves; I was nowhere near that cool), and I lived in New Hampshire for a few years, albeit on the border with Massachusetts, so the physical and socio-economic geography is roughly familiar (granted, I wasn’t there until after the events of the book take place). Carroll’s use of language is clear and also delightful, and her supple manipulation of perspective-over-time while narrating events of the past is so exactly like having tea with someone and listening to them dish on events of their youth that it’s impossible not to feel like one is having the Very Best Time Ever while reading this book.

Also, this paragraph, which every element referred to has carefully been integrated into the Story So Far may be the best punch line (emphasis on PUNCH) ever:

“In retrospect I think of how appealing I would have been to the admissions board if I’d written about how my friend, a popular white boy who bought me as his slave in middle school, and whose racist father taught social studies at our high school, had then suggested I take advantage of the practice or policy of favoring groups of folks who have been discriminated against based on their skin color. Now that would have been a college essay.”

I love everything about that paragraph. It is a Perfect Paragraph. And she’s not wrong.