About Necessary Fictions

In Deadwood, David Milch argued that the stories we tell to make sense of our lives, the “lies” we “agree upon” — about meaning and justice and God and power, yes, but also about who we are to ourselves and one another — are fictions.

But they are necessary ones.

And that's what this newsletter is about.

What I keep returning to — in fiction, in nonfiction, in the Discourse that flares up and dies down with each ephemeral news cycle — is when something forces into view a question we’ve learned to live around.

Not just politically, but personally. Whether we are who we think we are. Whether we want what we think we want. Whether the life we’re living is one we chose or one we woke up inside of one day.

Kierkegaard called it “the dizziness of freedom” — what happens when freedom “looks down into its own possibility.” Most of us manage that dizziness by not looking. A lot of what I write about is what happens when something won’t let us.

Which is also what politics is actually about, underneath the policy and the ideology. When Tony Soprano briefly surfaces from a coma after being shot, he keeps repeating the same two questions: “Who am I? Where am I going?”

I write from my own experience of all this — what stuck, what I couldn’t shake, what I noticed but could not resolve.

The wager I’m making is that my experience isn’t unique, that you’ve thought the same thoughts as well. The questions may be mine, but the “dizziness” — and the necessary fictions — are ours.

About me

I’m Elias Isquith — a writer and editor. I’ve worked at The Ezra Klein Show, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the Open Society Foundations, among other places.