Identity
The refined performance of belonging, and its private cost.
A recurring figure in the memoir is the culturally literate listener — a performance the author admits to refining for thirty years, in rooms progressively further from Kuruman, with increasing proficiency and increasing private shame.
Identity here is not a possession but a competence: something practised, priced, and audited. The book is unusually exact about what that competence buys and what it quietly forecloses.
From the text
“I performed the culturally literate listener — with increasing proficiency and increasing private shame.”
Prologue