But you don’t have to be white to remember those weird years before you became smart and responsible and tightly edited. The pain and pleasures of taking wrong turns, being self-destructive in order to create something and doing things that aren’t you to find out who you are aren’t specific to race – they’re just a consequence of being young.

– In case you missed it, here’s an excerpt from my piece in Daily Life a couple of weeks ago on the absence of white characters in wasted youth narratives.