An essay collection exploring the author's education as a man, writer and activist and how we form our identities in life, in politics, and in art. It is the authors manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nations history, including his fathers death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing - Tarot-reading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckleythe writing of his first novel, Edinburgh, and the election of Donald Trump.