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Notes -
A gay friend once described his alienation in high school in a way that made me think (but not say) "Yeah, that sounds exactly like being an insecure fat kid." I think the internal experience of alienation is pretty source independent. Maybe Mailer was just a weird asshole that no one else liked, doing a big old Typical Mind Fallacy.
Portnoy's Complaint, a book I read in November that I loved, did this well, using the particulars of the Jewish experience to really dig into the universal experience of male puberty. Mindy Kaling's Never Have I Ever did a good job with it as well.
It's striking seeing a book about soldiers where nobody is friends and nobody likes each other and everybody is brooding and alienated, compared to stories about war where comrades come together. And something you notice is that Band of Brothers starts out by kicking the Jew out of the company and then everyone gets along, where The Naked and Dead is full of Jews stewing about how everyone hates them and southie guys from Boston complaining about all the Yids.
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