After several days’ hard journey through the Sierra Morena, Don Quixote turns to Sancho and at last reveals his plan: For the love of his mistress, the Lady Dulcinea del Toboso, Quixote was going to go completely insane. Like Charlemagne’s great knight Orlando, or Amadis of Gaul, he would scatter his armor. He would tear his clothes. He would cry out his lamentations, dash his head against the rocks, pull cottages apart and trees up from the Earth, all while weeping for the succor of his lady. Sancho would witness these deeds and then report them to the Lady Dulcinea. Then, Quixote says, he would gain perpetual renown all over the face of the Earth.
Sancho objects. Did not those other knights-errant—Orlando and Amadis and all the rest—have reasons for their madness?, he asks. Did not their ladies deceive them, scorn them, betray them, give them cause for their antics and their penances? Don Quixote had never courted the Lady Dulcinea at all. Her name was not even Dulcinea, but Aldonza Lorenzo and she was no high-born lady, but a farmer’s daughter. This was pointless. No, Quixote says, this was the whole point. A knight errant going mad for a good reason—there is neither pleasure nor merit in that. The thing is to become insane without cause and have my lady think: If I do all this when dry, what would I not do when wet?
Just how mad must he go? The two negotiate. Must he weep? For how long? Must he strip? Starve? Rip trees in half? Must he really dash his head against a rock? In the end, they agree it is enough for Quixote to pull down his breeches. Baring himself to this poor squire, he leaps through the air and then performs two somersaults, revealing things that made Sancho turn away. Now fully satisfied that he could swear his master was mad, the squire set off. But the Lady Dulcinea would never know of the love of Don Quixote. She’d never meet him, never love him, never hear anything at all about the great knight’s great devotion.
Showing your ass for the love of another has never gone out of fashion. It has happened every day of every year of each of the four centuries since the Quixote, in every place for every kind of ass and love. These are ordinarily private affairs. But late last year, in the span of a single week, two books appeared by authors whose madness had been very public. Both had undertaken great deeds to prove their love. Both had been utterly humiliated. Both found themselves spurned: rejected not only by the objects of their love, but by the country at large. They were mocked and hated; both were called delusional, even insane. In the wreckage of these immolations, both turned to writing, producing memoirs designed to sift through what was left, to set the record straight, to define themselves beyond the objects of their unrequited love and to explain who they really were. They’d shown their asses. Now they wanted to show their hearts. I am talking of course about the authors of Who I Really Am and American Canto: the artists John Hinckley Jr. and Olivia Nuzzi.
The strangest thing about John Hinckley Jr.’s memoir is that he is here to write it. He is just here: 45 years after he opened fire on Ronald Reagan outside the Washington Hilton Hotel, 44 years after a jury concluded that he really was insane, four years out from the 42 he spent in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Most American assassins—most capital-S Shooters, political, temple, school, or otherwise—don’t live beyond the hour of their crimes. If they explain themselves, they do so via the odd manifesto, written before the act. The surviving assassins, meanwhile, are mainly silent, getting on somewhere not quite among the living. Squeaky Fromme and Arthur Bremer keep low profiles. Sirhan Sirhan is suspended between doomed parole hearings in California. Mark David Chapman is still rotting in a New York prison. But John Hinckley Jr. is among us. He is living in Virginia now. He is uploading his music on YouTube. He’s selling big oil paintings of orange cats on eBay, dabbling in commentary, chopping it up with his fans on X. He wrote a book: his life and times, his photo on the jacket, a proper press and ISBN, available wherever books are sold.
You already know the plot. To hear Hinckley tell it is like finding Amelia Earhart’s diary washed up on the shore: There is nothing surprising in the tale but the telling. John Hinckley Jr., the runt son of a Texas oil family, went mad sometime in the 1970s. He drifted in and out of college, in and out of California, in and out of movie theaters showing Taxi Driver until he knew for certain that Jodie Foster loved him and they were meant to be together. He went to Yale to find her; he called her; he stalked Jimmy Carter to the Grand Ole Opry and then chickened out. When Mark David Chapman assassinated John Lennon in December 1980, Hinckley almost took his own life outside of the Dakota, but instead, in March 1981, he took a Saturday night special to the Washington Hilton Hotel and put a bullet twenty-five millimeters from Ronald Reagan’s heart. In 1982, Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity—becoming, through the subsequent passage of the Insanity Defense Reform Act, the most politically consequential schizophrenic in the history of the United States—and was sent to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for forty years to think about what he’d done.
John Hinckley Jr: Who I Really Am does not elaborate much on this story. The Hinckley of our imagination is possessed, the only citizen of an alternative reality; the Hinckley of the memoir is literal, rote, dutifully conventional. His childhood gets a single chapter, called “Childhood.” His aimless college years, his brief flirtation with the Nazi party, an imaginary girlfriend meant to placate his worried family, the demo tapes hauled to every record company in Los Angeles—all of this in nine chapters. In chapter seven, “Jodie Arrives.” The attack on Reagan comes at almost precisely the memoir’s midway point. His trial, which took two years, lasts 13 chapters. His time in St. Elizabeth’s, which lasted 40, gets 13 too—barely 50 pages of a nearly 400-page book. He knows what people came to read about.
More than anything, Hinckley’s book reads like the autobiography of a boomer rock star making a cash grab at the tail end of a long career. John Hinckley Jr: replaying the hits, giving a peek into the process that produced them; zooming in on the most famous moments, talking growth and redemption in the years since his wild, controversial prime. What carries us through much of this is Hinckley’s style, which alternates between the swagger of the hardest man who ever lived—“The next time I went out I wasn’t coming back without a dead president.”—and the charming, almost childish grasping that distinguishes a bad writer from a nonwriter: After committing “the crime of all time,” “word spread like a wildfire on fast forward.” “My psychosis was really kicking my ass at this point,” he explains. A psychiatrist went over his life “with a magnifying glass from hell.” He “was paler than all the ghosts in the world put together.” Of his first time hearing The Beatles, he writes: “Be it by ‘All My Loving’, ‘She Loves You’, or, of course, the finale of ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, these guys exploded onto our culture like the bombs Kennedy and Johnson had been dropping on Vietnam for years.”
The Beatles are dear to Hinckley, John Lennon in particular. His first love was music: “People would forever know the name of John Hinckley Jr., the biggest star in the history of music. That might be all they would ever know me for, but it would be more than enough,” he explains of his teenaged dreams. Who I Really Am is a künstlerroman, the story of how the artist became. His influences—musical and murderous—blend together: We are not yet 20 pages in when he recalls the assassination of John F. Kennedy, trying to imagine what Lee Harvey Oswald must be like. The memoir moves like this, from Oswald to the Beatles, from Jack Ruby to the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Charles Whitman, David Chapman, John Wilkes Booth, David Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy, Woody Guthrie like so many touchstones in Hinckley’s becoming. It is as if we are reading the story of an artist who started out in Britpop and drifted along the currents of fashion into murder, who simply discovered that he was better with an automatic pistol than a guitar.
In a way, that is all that happened. We know the plot of Hinckley’s life. But the story of his memoir is about one eternal need: John Hinckley Jr. wanted to perform a great deed, in any form, and by it become perfect and famous. Which is to say: He wanted to be loved. The vehicles are varied, interchangeable. It was music first, sending him by bus to California where he struck out with every A&R man he could find. It was Jodie Foster next by accident, a confluence of schizophrenia and timing: If not for Taxi Driver, he “would have found some other actress, developed the same nutjob psychotic complex toward her, and acted something out from her film, just knowing that that would win her love,” Hinckley writes, and I believe him. When he was sane, he wanted to play rock n’ roll because the crowds would cheer their love for him. When he was crazy, he imagined he’d become worthy of the love of a woman he’d imagined and earn her love through violence. Years into his stay at St. Elizabeth’s, when the madness burned away, he still had his desire.
Indeed, perhaps the most surprising part of the story Hinckley tells—the one part that feels truly tender, perhaps because is the only part about a real relationship between Hinckley and another person—is the time he spends with Leslie deVeau, a fellow asylum inmate found not guilty by reason of insanity after murdering her 10-year-old daughter and then almost blowing off her own arm with a shotgun in an abortive suicide attempt. (The arm was later amputated.) It is the only time, as far as I can tell, that Hinckley’s desire became specific, focused on a reciprocating human being. It is the only time that he seems happy. When Hinckley is placed in isolation, the two learn sign language to speak to one another. When deVeau receives ground privileges, she stands beneath his window for hours, the two shouting back and forth.
Eventually the years dragged on and deVeau, released in 1985, wanted to get on with her life. Alone again, Hinckley returned to music. At an asylum talent show, he sang Bob Dylan songs—“And I have to tell you, I think I may have even sounded better than he did”—and a few years later, returned to sing a few of his own: “I wasn’t a hopeful wannabe version of someone else. I was my own person. I was John Hinckley Jr, singing a John Hinckley Jr. song.” The crowd gave him “a hell of an ovation”—this, he writes, “is what it felt like”: being seen, being famous, being perfect, being loved, the dream unchanged since he was a teenager. Hinckley still considers himself a musician. While doing press for the book, he complained about how he’d been trying to book concert gigs, but the venues “always seem to cancel on me and it’s very frustrating because I know I can put on a good show and sing my songs and make people happy.”
He is still asking to be loved. He still finds it painful. He’s so sorry.
Through Who I Really Am, Hinckley is in anguish: defensive and remorseful, incessantly writing against what he imagines people think of him, and apologizing, over and over, for what he did. He actually admired Reagan, he writes. He loved him. He’s so sorry about what he put Jodie Foster through. The “scariest thing that has happened” since his release came in the fall of 2024 came when he logged on to Twitter. He remembers the tweet coming in: “‘John, we’re all very big fans of your early work,’ one person praised. My smile and ego grew, just knowing that the poster was talking about my music career. Then I found out how sadly wrong I was.… One person put a shot of Trump right after the assassination attempt on him the previous July and asked me to do a better job….They were screaming for the head and the life of their President.” He was horrified. He pleaded with his followers: “I’m a man of peace” now! I’m not that guy anymore! John Hinckley Jr. is so sorry. His whole book hums with the anxiety of a man who cannot decide if he deserves forgiveness or will never get it, if he was rightly “one of the most hated humans in world history,” or a nobody who made a mistake. “I wondered if being known was worth being hated,” he writes at one point, and he never says one way or another, but he’s sorry. He’s very, very sorry.
Many people believe John Hinckley Jr. is a liar, that his so-called “insanity” and subsequent remorse are cons. They see the moments where he seems a little too proud of what he’s done—his attack on Reagan “helped” Foster’s career, he writes in one aside; his name would be immortal, he writes several times—but the truth about Hinckley is something sadder still. He is like a child, pleading, apologizing, begging to be allowed to go back outside after a long grounding. He is so sincere and so naïve that it sounds to anybody with an ounce of cynicism like he’s lying, but he’s not: He is terrified that he has ruined his dream. He’s very sorry for the pain he’s caused. He just wants another chance.
The delusion that ruined Hinckley’s life, his great act of devotion to the imaginary woman he mistook for Jodie Foster, is gone. But what remains—what has always been there, since the beginning—is the delusion that it is not too late, that he can still become lovable and loved, famous, and perfected. “I still have a dream. I still hope that some day, in some way, my music career can happen,” he writes near the end. The legend who shot Reagan, reduced to an old man hoping that somebody will watch him play guitar on YouTube. And who among us, in the ruins of some failed love, some misadventure, some terrible mistake, has not been reduced to plaintive begging? “On March 30, 1981 I was asking to be loved. I was asking my family to take me back, and I was asking Jodie Foster to hold me in her heart. My assassination attempt was an act of love. I’m sorry love has to be painful,” Hinckley wrote in the waning days of his trial. He is still asking to be loved. He still finds it painful. He’s so sorry.
Olivia Nuzzi is not sorry. Or perhaps she is. She won’t say, and there is significantly less to say about American Canto. Hinckley waited 40 years to write his book. Nuzzi’s was on the shelves less than 14 months after leaving New York magazine. The book includes at least one incident—the assassination of Charlie Kirk, or “the man who would be assassinated,” in Nuzzi’s much-ridiculed naming conventions—that occurred 83 days before the official publication date. American Canto is a draft, and reads like one.
The scandal that provoked the memoir unfolded—continues to unfold—with similar speed: In September 2024, news broke that Nuzzi, for many years a star reporter and chief chronicler of the Trump campaigns and administration, had engaged in an “inappropriate relationship” with a reporting subject later revealed to be Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A month later, she “parted ways” with New York. She filed and then dropped a protective order against her erstwhile fiancé, Ryan Lizza, before 2024 was out. In fall of 2025, Vanity Fair announced it had hired Nuzzi, but in the two months between the hiring and the publication of American Canto, further allegations about the extent of her involvement—both sexual and professionally unethical—with both RFK Jr. and at least one other former candidate for president, led Vanity Fair to let her contract expire. The bio at the end of American Canto—“Olivia Nuzzi is the West Coast editor of Vanity Fair”—was accurate for less than a month.
Hinckley was met with horror and outrage, a sincere desire by a large segment of the American public that he be put to death. Nuzzi was met with ridicule and prurient gossip, a sincere desire by a large segment of the American media that she continue to titillate and entertain their schadenfreude. The reviews of American Canto doubled as reviews of Nuzzi herself, animated by the kind of cruelty reserved for former rivals who can no longer help or hurt you. In the play and opera Hunchback Variations, Quasimodo tells his partner Beethoven that there are two kinds of artistic failure: The first “is greeted with noise,” “clamor,” with the public’s “hooting and booing and hissing and razberrying.” The second is greeted with silence, “the sound of our wicked planet turning in space.” Despite his efforts, Hinckley has been met with silence. Nuzzi has endured the hooting and booing, the hissing and the razberrying.
Small-minded jealousies and bloodlust aside, the critics were not lying. Let me do my duty and pile on: American Canto is among the worst books that I have ever read. It is guilty of the worst sin in literature: aspiring to be art and failing, without even the decency to become funny in the process. We can forgive pathos straying into bathos. This is outhos—nothing, a hypnotic blank. It is ponderous: Her job, before all this, was not to cover campaigns and administrations, but “to bear witness to the processes of American presidential politics, to … attempt to understand those who sought or wielded or influenced executive power.” It is pretentious: “The story of the relationship had broken, the bullet metaphorical” (in contrast to the bullets “hypothetical,” and “literal” elsewhere). It does not, at times, make any sense: “A few minutes later, the planes swooped down to spray the flames in the bluffs. I watched from the Pacific Coast Highway, as far away from my problems as I could get on land, which was not far enough. You cannot outrun your life on fire.” Is your life separate from your body? Are you on fire? Can you outrun yourself? Janet Malcolm’s kickers had a bit more focus.
American Canto is certain that it wants to be about grand things, about metaphors and levels of abstraction, a kaleidoscopic tour of the United States, the Trump years, drones, surveillance, fires natural and self-inflicted, her own scandal, the tour through hell both literal and metaphorical, lit up in screaming neon by the title AMERICAN CANTO, but Nuzzi is not certain how to actually produce such a book. The fragments (there are no chapters), the slips between image and dialogue, description and simile, the editorial voice weaving in and out of scenes and memories—the line between lyric essay and lyric avoidance, between art and artlessness: It’s very thin. So too the line between mysterious and arch, literature as an act of refusal, and cloying, opaque, “literariness” as a refusal to know what art wants to say and then to say it. “I do not wish to be understood,” Nuzzi writes, “which no one seems to understand.” But she wants us to understand her love of America, and belief in angels, and how she mainly wears black and lives “in the nighttime,” and how she is friends with Sally Quinn.
My most common note, scrawled over 100 times in the margins of a 303-page book, was “WHAT?” My second most common was “Come on.” American Canto puts one in mind of somebody who very badly wants to be Joan Didion, but is not. It puts one in mind of Kerry Howley’s Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs, if only somebody had beaten Howley about the head with a brick, convinced her to send nudes to Reality Winner during the reporting process, and insisted she refer to Winner exclusively as The Woman Who Leaked the Sensitive Materials. Speaking of the naming conventions: they are inexplicable. RFK is famously “The Politician,” and Lizza is “the man I did not marry.” There is “the executive,” “the bodyguard,” “the movie star,” “the staffer.” This would make sense if it were a legal matter, or if Nuzzi were committed to a kind of ethereal remove where people blend with their avatars, titles, symbolic meanings (I am sure she had something like this in mind), but Sally Quinn is Sally Quinn. Tony Fauci is Tony Fauci. Donald Trump is of course Donald Trump. Yet Joe Biden is “the forty-sixth President.”
This might have worked had Nuzzi referred to everybody by this kind of title and then, in Washington book fashion, included a very detailed index using only pseudonyms: The senator who I could totally embarrass … 22, 137, 138, 212, 224. That would have been a good joke. But Nuzzi is not joking. She wants to be serious. That’s fine, but she is also humorless, which is not. While I was reading American Canto, I had occasion to drive down the length of the Pacific Coast Highway from the Ventura County line to Santa Monica while listening to a Lana del Rey record cover to cover, and this was the closest I ever came to understanding what Nuzzi was going for. But Lana del Rey is in on her own joke.
There are parts in the middle stretches of American Canto where the strange, shallow insistence of it all begins to wash over you, where you can become slightly hypnotized and just ride the Canto vibe. This is to say that in its best moments, it has the appeal of a lava lamp. American Canto is a book where the frequent intrusions of its inevitable main character, Donald Trump—speaking for paragraphs at a time, and sometimes pages—comes as a clarifying relief from Nuzzi’s meditations on roads and clouds and fire, the “ambivalent Earth” and black holes, which are like American consensus reality, “open questions sprawling wider to encircle the whole of us.” (“Time becomes space and space becomes time; this is physics,” she explains). Nuzzi still has her talent for extracting interesting copy from President Trump. New York should let her come back just once to craft a feature around his thoughts on death.
Olivia Nuzzi does not want to be observed. She wants to be the observer: the one who sees and knows and records.
American Canto has far less to say about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. You get the sense that Nuzzi really loved him, that she worried about him (and about “the worm in his brain that other people found so funny”). But he appears with scarcely more reality than Dulcinea, or Hinckley’s Jodie Foster. When he abandons her and she’s left to flee to California and dodge calls and watch the fires and write this book, she is still not angry, she says, despite the ways that this great act of devotion, meant to remain secret, destroyed her life and her career and made her infamous and imperfect. After all, she says, “I loaded a gun. I loaded a gun and set it on my nightstand,” before launching into a clumsy recitation of how guns, literal, are part of the American inferno she is trying to escape.
Nuzzi is not sorry and she does not want to be loved—not the way John Hinckley does—but she does want, despite her protests, to be seen. Just not like this. She does not say I’m sorry over and over, or talk about a dream unrealized. She has the subtlety to tell us that she does not “think of [herself] as a reporter, really,” and to confess that it is “a horror” to “have made of myself what others have determined to be Good Copy” but not to say, outright, “I think of myself as a writer, as an artist.” The book is meant at once to articulate and achieve Nuzzi’s desire to retreat back from the valleys of tabloid fodder, and up the mountains of literature: inferno, purgatorio, paradisio. “I have only a flight instinct, and reporting, I never had to consider until now, is a way of fleeing yourself,” she writes. Olivia Nuzzi does not want to be observed. She wants to be the observer: the one who sees and knows and records.
She could, I think. The great tragedy of American Canto is that it contains the beginnings of precisely the sort of book that Nuzzi wants to write: the lyric, resonant unwinding of American life. It comes through most clearly in later sections, particularly where she remembers her father, and begins to draw everything into focus before veering off again. But it was precisely the conditions that precipitated the production of this particular book—the scandal, the “need to write through it,” which she disavows in the very book where she is doing it—that forced the manuscript out in such disastrous form. That is what made it impossible to read this book, even if it had been far more accomplished, as anything other than a statement by a resident of the circle of American hell reserved for the sin of scandal. Hinckley waited 40 years. Maybe American Canto will read differently in 40 more. Maybe Nuzzi will write a different book by then, one closer to creating her as the artist she wants to be.
Nuzzi tells us, in one passage, how often others report that she has appeared to them in dreams. “I wonder, too, if this is a function of being a visible face but a veiled personality,” she writes, “If my impression contains empty space that renders me an adaptable idea and thus a useful device for subconscious minds.” But she is telling us about her dream, here. She wants transcendence. Many years ago, I heard an early novel of Virginia Woolf’s described as “not a work of genius, but obviously a work by a genius.” Olivia Nuzzi is not a genius, and American Canto is not a work of art. But it is a work by an artist, maybe. There is time.
Many of Nuzzi’s reviewers and critics have accused her of lacking self-awareness. But like Hinckley, Nuzzi is not confused about the facts. She knows what she did, and the result, and what her name means now. “My work had been what I retreated to when everything else seemed in doubt,” she writes early on. “Now a monumental f-ckup had collided my private life with the public interest. My work could not be retreated to because my career was in doubt. I still had something to save then, or I thought that I did, though I had nothing in particular to do besides shelter in place. Wait for the collapse of my life to conclude. Wait to assess the wreckage.” The collapse of Nuzzi’s life has not yet concluded. She is still assessing the wreckage—still, in fact, producing it. It is easy enough to call this all a kind of madness, to see American Canto as some spectacular act of anosognosia. But not everyone who says that they aren’t crazy, the world is crazy, is lying. Who, with the embers still smoldering in the ruins of a life, would say, you’re right, I don’t know myself at all, I’ll lay down here and die where you can mock me? Olivia Nuzzi is still becoming, and still has time, if not to regain the life she had, then to refuse the life the world has settled on, to go out into the wilderness and plan her next act.
Gary Vee, who wrote a book called Crush It! and harangues his many millions of followers about “gratitude” and “hustle,” says that “self-awareness is the ultimate skill to have.” Autobiography in particular “demands a certain degree of introspection,” Caroline Knapp once explained; the author must “allow her own self-awareness to inform the events she describes.” Phillip Lopate, the dean of American essays, makes it even simpler: The memoirist must create “a satisfyingly self-aware narrator” or else fail. Inscribed in the pronaos of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, is the commandment, preceding the Oracle inside: You must know thyself.
Lack of self-awareness is meant to be fatal, to memoirs and to all of us. We are always hearing about this: He’s just not self-aware; she doesn’t know herself; they’re totally delusional. What can this possibly mean? Be more self-aware, the critic says from outside, by which they mean: Admit you are who I imagine you to be. It will be easier when you submit to that external judgement. It will be peaceful. It is easiest, which is why this is how many of us live, or at least pretend to: mistaking some external judgment for the wisdom of our souls, looking outward to look inward, complying, saying yes, thank you, I see myself so much more clearly now. Anybody who tells you to be more self-aware is full of sh-t and trying to kill you.
You can’t be self-aware, of course, because there is no inner “self” to be aware of. You cannot know yourself because there is no such thing, no secret, no shelf-stable reality of motives, qualities, and facts, buried in your chest at birth and hidden from your sight. Do not go to therapy and ask them who you really are. They don’t know either. Even a memoir is only a self in snapshot: frozen, left behind, not even stable in itself. It is “by such invisible presences”—the “consciousness of other groups impinging upon ourselves; public opinion; what other people say and think—that “the subject of this memoir,” as Virginia Woolf described herself, “is tugged this way and that way every day” of a life. “It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel,” says Roland Barthes, in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes: “I am writing a text, and I call it Roland Barthes.” Who You Really Are emerges, always, in the living, in the circumstances you chose and did not choose, in the friction between your desires and the resistance of the world, in the gap between who you say you are and who you reveal yourself to be. The delusions make the man, set him toward himself. The Oracle of Delphi says: Know thyself but the Oracle knows the future, or claims to. Lana, trapped in time, says: I was one thing/ Now I’m being another.
In the wilderness, in the inferno, on a long journey across America to the Washington Hilton Hotel: better this than the meek, the cowardly, the self-aware. What is there but the desire to be seen as we want to be seen? The desire to be loved as we are, as we want to be, to be famous and perfect, at least to one person? Many of us find an object for our devotion. Most of us feel seen then, for a while. But when it fails, when our witness sees someone else behind our face instead, or can’t see us at all, when it all goes to hell—spectacularly, publicly, with a tabloid saga or a body count or just for the mundane failures, yours or theirs, to see what so desperately wants seeing—some turn to the public. This is how to become an artist: devotion sublimated, turned public, made abstract. The public is easier to fool than a lover. The public is a better mirror to fool yourself, to do it so well that you cease to be fooling. Oftentimes this is faintly ridiculous. It is always delusional. The act of devotion is rarely successful—almost nobody self-actualizes, not fully, really nobody but Donald Trump has ever done it—but after a while, you land somewhere in the spaces you have opened up by your insistence. You become the thing who is trying to be the thing that you are trying to be.
John Hinckley calling venues, trying to book a gig. Olivia Nuzzi waiting for her fires to burn out in California. Don Quixote, on his deathbed, waking up from a fever dream. He declares that he is no longer Don Quixote de la Mancha, but Alonso Quixano, modest hidalgo; he renounces the whole misadventure. He denounces the romances of chivalry that drove him mad. He asks for a confessor. He makes his will. He’s lucid, calm, and ready. He finally knows himself the way that all the others have for this whole time. It is Sancho, so long the skeptic, so long the complainer, so long the one demanding that Quixote give up his adventures and take them home, who cannot deal. Forget all those times he called him mad before, Sancho says, the greatest madness a man can commit in this life is to let himself die, just like that, from this surrender, from this pointless melancholy. He calls his master lazy. He begs him to get out of bed. Just don’t die, he pleads. “Let’s go to the countryside dressed as shepherds, just like we planned. Maybe behind some bush we’ll find the Lady Dulcinea, just as pretty as you please.” It’s no use. Quixote’s devotion is gone. He has accepted who he is, and dies. He is buried, in light of all that he was and all that he became, not as Orlando or Amadis of Gaul or any other character out of a storybook, but not as Alonso Quixano either. He is buried as Don Quixote: the famous, mad, and perfect knight, renowned across the face of the world.
