You can't check in so you can never leave.

Let's all go someplace and not talk to each other.

Hotels, like all the other accessories of travel, like airports and train stations, are not-places. Hotel rooms are always familiar places but a little distant, chilly, anonymous. When a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, it first encases itself; then, once it is safely enclosed, it dissolves. From the soup of material the caterpillar leaves behind, a butterfly begins to assemble itself.

Some intimation of this possibility is present whenever you enter a hotel room—the cheaper the better. Just because you never does turn into a butterfly doesn’t mean it will never happen. But who has not rolled into a room with their suitcase and laid, fully clothed, on the sterile bed, feeling that they could, if they wanted, emerge having reconstituted themselves into somebody else altogether?

A piece that never happened last year, thanks to the general chaos of 2020, was a review of Eimear McBride’s book Strange Hotel. I think the book ended up slipping through the cracks in general, which is too b…