“After an exhaustion of New Narrative trickling up to mass market autofiction, literary authors are experimenting with genres like crime, thriller, horror,” observed Whitney Mallett, the critic and titular Whitney behind *The* *Whitney Review*, in a recent Substack newsletter. A decade ago, she continues, narratively driven work “seemed the least cool and contemporary mode… but lately I’m really here for people taking the risk to do it”; that is, “to earnestly have a go at building a fleeting world that I can emotionally enter rather than just opting to deconstruct.” Reading her words last month reminded me of a literary rut in which I’d once found myself stuck. It was the end of the summer of 2022, and I’d managed to finally read a bunch of venerated books I’d been meaning to cross off my list for a while. One among them traced itself along a series of thinly veiled autofictional Socratic dialogues, each of them strung together in the hopes of imparting the lesson that friendship can actually be kinda fab.…