A quote for December 2024.

I wasn’t a child for long, and after I wasn’t, I was
something else. I was this. And that. A blast furnace,
a steel maze inside, the low-level ­engine room of an
ocean liner. My eye repeats horizontally what I by
this time ­already know: there is no turning back to
be someone I might have been. Now there will only
ever be multiples of me.

—Mary Jo Bang

From ‘Self-Portrait in the Bathroom Mirror,’ Paris Review, Issue 216 (Spring 2016).

Photography by Tony Reid.