Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

The opening lines of "Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You":

"The day my sister, Gillian, decided to pronounce her name with a hard G was, coincidentally, the same day my mother returned, early and alone, from her honeymoon. Neither of these things surprised me. Gillian, who was between her third and fourth years at Barnard, was dating a "language theory" professor named Rainer Maria Schultz and had consequently become something of a linguistic zealot, often ranting about something called "pure" language, of which Gillian with a hard G was supposedly an example. My mother, on the other hand, had rather rashly decided to marry an odd man named Barry Rogers."

"Someday this Pain Will Be Useful to You "is the story of a summer in the life of James Sveck, a sophisticated, vulnerable, and sexually ambiguous young man with a deep appreciation for the world and no idea how to live in it.