| “Everything that surrounds my meeting with him has the color of shame.” Susan Sontag’s 1987 short story begins with this glum admission from its narrator. The tale offers a lightly fictionalized account of Sontag’s own meeting with the Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann, when she was a precocious teen-ager growing up in Southern California. “I accumulated gods,” she writes. “What Stravinsky was for music Thomas Mann became for literature.” When the narrator and her friend Merrill arrive at Mann’s house, in Pacific Palisades, they sit in the parked car and go over their agreed-upon topics of conversation: Sontag will begin by talking about her love for “The Magic Mountain,” and her friend will ask about Mann’s current project. “The rest we were going to work out now,” Sontag writes, “in the two hours we’d allotted to rehearse.” The story is at once a warning that maybe you shouldn’t meet your idols (not necessarily because they’ll be disappointing but because you’ll overthink everything you say, to a devastating degree), and a tale of teen anxiety—of a young girl who “longed to learn everything” but was stuck “doing time” while fourteen and a junior in high school. | 
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