I wonder if you, like me, feel, just now, like a ghost in the sunlight, awash in memories as your life shifts from student to professional, and your professors become your colleagues. I’ll pull rank now—but just for a moment—and say that my ghosts are probably older than yours.

In a new essay for The New York Review of Books, Hilton Als begins with a discussion of Truman Capote and heads into a moving consideration of art and loss.

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