These linked essays of personal and cultural critique include meditations on home and childhood, love and sex, art and literature, parenting and self-destruction, on the city and on death. Walton constantly slips through and between memory's tenuous folds: "that never happened, exactly, but it's certainly not a lie." Witty, candid, defying category, dogma, and expectation, Unsavory Thoughts is a bold self-portrait in an inscrutable landscape: lyric, profound, tragic, hilarious, absurd, insightful, teasing, searing, sincere. This is the world we live in—real or otherwise.