Flash back to 2013. My debut novel, The Residue Years, is coming out. I worked for 13 years on it, and it was like, “How am I going to mark this occasion?” So I buy these shoes I can’t afford, Prada studded loafers, and I wear them for my first national press tour.
A few months later, I’d just finished my class at NYU. I was an adjunct professor in New York, commuting between teaching at three or four schools. I’m sitting at the West Fourth subway grading papers because that’s what you do when you teach part-time. I have the shoes with me because they cost like $1,100 and I want to preserve them by getting taps—sole protectors—applied. The train arrives, which I didn’t see coming because I was grading, and I scramble on. Then I realize I don’t have the bag of shoes. I hop off at the next station and go back, but it’s gone. It hurt.
When my next book, Survival Math, came out in 2019, I got the studded Prada lace-ups you see here. I was like, “Oh, here’s another pair.” Fast-forward to 2021 and I’d won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. I wore these shoes to the ceremony. I could have bought some new ones, but they were significant to me. It felt like all the stress I had when I lost that first pair made them special.
They had fold-up chairs at the ceremony, and since I’m kind of tall, my feet were up under the person in front of me. They call my name, and I go accept my award. When I sit back down, the guy in front of me turns around and says, “Mitch? Man, I just kept looking at these shoes.” It was Jake Silverstein, the editor in chief of The New York Times Magazine. So here’s a guy I really respect speaking to me at the Pulitzer ceremony. And he doesn’t say, “Congratulations on the Pulitzer.” He turns around and says, “Man, those are some great shoes.”