A Visit from the Goon Squad

Aug 25, 2026

A Visit from the Goon Squad features a character who chronicles a compulsive habit framed as a “personal challenge” in therapy. In a hotel bathroom setting, Sasha notices a wallet and wrestles with the urge to take it, treating the act as both defiance and identity. Her therapist, Coz, reframes the impulse and encourages Sasha to consider leaving what she could easily steal, making the inner conflict the story’s driving force.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryStory & Novel

FormatPDF

Pages265

Reading Time6 h 48 min

AccessFree to download

Found Objects

Part A

Chapter 1-Found Objects

Chapter 2-The Gold Cure

Chapter 3-Ask Me IfI Care

Chapter 4-Safari

Chapter 5-You (Plural)

Chapter 6-X’s and O’s

Part B

Chapter 7-Ato B

Chapter 8-Selling the General

Chapter 9-Forty-Minute Lunch: Kitty Jackson Opens Up About Love, Fame, and Nixon!

Chapter 10-Out of Body

Chapter 11-Good-bye, My Love

Chapter 12-Great Rock and Roll Pauses

Chapter 13-Pure Language

Acknowledgments

ALSO BY JENNIFER EGAN The Keep Look at Me Emerald City and Other Stories The Invisible Circus For Peter M., with gratitude Contents Other Books by this Author Title Page Dedication Part A Chapter 1-Found Objects Chapter 2-The Gold Cure Chapter 3-Ask Me IfI Care Chapter 4-Safari Chapter 5-You (Plural) Chapter 6-X’s and O’s Part B Chapter 7-Ato B Chapter 8-Selling the General Chapter 9-Forty-Minute Lunch: Kitty Jackson Opens Up About Love, Fame, and Nixon! Chapter 10-Out of Body Chapter 11-Good-bye, My Love Chapter 12-Great Rock and Roll Pauses Chapter 13-Pure Language Acknowledgments A Note About the Author Copyright “Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.” “The unknown element in the lives of other people is like that of nature, which each fresh scientific discovery merely reduces but does not abolish.” —Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time Found Objects It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel. Sasha was adjusting her yellow eye shadow in the mirror when she noticed a bag on the floor beside the sink that must have belonged to the woman whose peeing she could faintly hear through the vaultlike door of a toilet stall. Inside the rim of the bag, barely visible, was a wallet made of pale green leather. It was easy for Sasha to recognize, looking back, that the peeing woman’s blind trust had provoked her: We live in a city where people will steal the hair off your head if you give them half a chance, but you leave your stuff lying in plain sight and expect it to be waiting for you when you come back? It made her want to teach the woman a lesson. But this wish only camouflaged the deeper feeling Sasha always had: that fat, tender wallet, offering itself to her hand—it seemed so dull, so life-as-usual to just leave it there rather than seize the moment, accept the challenge, take the leap, fly the coop, throw caution to the wind, live dangerously (“I get it,” Coz, her therapist, said), and take the fucking thing.“You mean steal it.” He was trying to get Sasha to use that word, which was harder to avoid in the case of a wallet than with a lot of the things she’d lifted over the past year, when her condition (as Coz referred to it) had begun to accelerate: five sets of keys, fourteen pairs of sunglasses, a child’s striped scarf, binoculars, a cheese grater, a pocketknife, twenty-eight bars of soap, and eighty-five pens, ranging from cheap ballpoints she’d used to sign debit-card slips to the aubergine Visconti that cost two hundred sixty dollars online, which she’d lifted from her former boss’s lawyer during a contracts meeting. Sasha no longer took anything from stores—their cold, inert goods didn’t tempt her. Only from people. “Okay,” she said.“Steal it.” Sasha and Coz had dubbed that feeling she got the “personal challenge,”as in: taking the wallet was a way for Sasha to assert her toughness, her individuality. What they needed to do was switch things around in her head so that the challenge became not taking the wallet but leaving it. That would be the cure, although Coz never used words like “cure.” He wore funky sweaters and let her call him Coz, but he was old school inscrutable, to the point where Sasha couldn’t tell if he was gay or straight, if he’d written famous books, or if (as she sometimes suspected) he was one of those escaped cons who impersonate surgeons and wind up leaving their operating tools inside people’s skulls. Of course, these questions could have been resolved on Google in less than a minute, but they were useful questions (according to Coz), and so far, Sasha had resisted. The couch where she lay in his

FAQs

What triggers Sasha’s urge in the opening episode?

Sasha finds a wallet in a hotel bathroom setting while she hears the woman in the adjacent stall. The wallet feels like a challenge she can seize, prompting her to consider taking it.

How does Coz describe Sasha’s compulsion?

Coz frames Sasha’s behavior as a “personal challenge” tied to asserting toughness and individuality. He pushes Sasha to change the meaning of the impulse.

What key change does Sasha experience after taking the wallet?

After the wallet is taken, the narrative shifts from a tense, dire evening to a sense of possibility and amused confidence, as Sasha returns to her evening with a hidden weight in her bag.

Aug 25, 2026

Upload by Lucas Martin