Day 15: "An Upset Place"

James Whorton Jr. (The Gettysburg Review, April 2023)

In this twenty-two-day series, we are counting down the days to publication (October 22, 2024) with a brief passage from each of the twenty-two essays included in The Best American Essays 2024. These excerpts were curated by Best American Essays Editorial Assistant Cheyenne Paterson and are presented in the order of the volume’s table of contents.

“It is strange to be a child. As children, we sense at some point that we came from somewhere—we did not give birth to ourselves after all—but have no means of seeing our origins. By the time we think to look around or ask questions, we’re already in the middle of something else. Even our parents—for me, the people who rode in the front seat of the Pontiac for twenty-one hours on the drive to Arkansas—are not the people who made us anymore. Those people were younger, and our names were not constantly on their lips. Maybe I should say it is strange to be a person.”

—James Whorton Jr., “A Strange Place,” The Gettysburg Review, April 2024.