Pale, nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt-cut hair lolled around on sofas, riffling Penguin Classics provocatively… But it wasn't just intellectual experiences. They were peddling emotional ones, too. For fifty bucks, I learned, you could 'relate without getting close.' For a hundred, a girl would lend you her Bartok records, have dinner, and then let you watch while she had an anxiety attack.

The Insanity Defense: The Complete Prose (ed. Random House Incorporated, 2007) - ISBN: 9780812978117