At the dinner party where you will die, a millennial who reads complains about those who don’t. The game begins: what was the last book you read, and how are you going to convince the others you read it?

You are fairly confident you read one. Your eyes scanned the letters, making them into words, and scanned the words, making them into sentences. But you can’t quite remember if you took less than an hour, or more than a year to read the book. Either way, you “devoured it” or “lived with it,” and both qualify as reading.

At some point when reading the book (which you loved, by the way, and would totally recommend), didn’t you find yourself drifting off and confusing yourself for the character? Did you not, a couple times during the reading of the book—which your friend sitting next to you definitely also read, before you; uh oh, was she the one who recommended it to you?—tell a story of something that happened to you, only to remember it happened to the protagonist? Is the book so you? Because what if it’s actually her?

Were you seen reading the book? Any selfies? Why not? Were you embarrassed by the book? Or embarrassed by yourself? You don’t really have a social media presence that allows for reading, or any intellectual pursuits besides color theory, or a presence at all. You don’t even exist.

That’s the problem with your generation: not that you are illiterate, but that you are obsessed with summing each other up in images. You are a whole person! How to convince the dinner party of this?

When the group finally asks you what you’re reading, you are able to remember the width of the book and the shapes on the cover, but not the title, author, or any other defining features. You stumble over the word “book,” wondering if it wasn’t, maybe, an article, or an essay. I think you probably read the book; you’re just nervous because of stage fright. Because you used to have to stand up in front of the class and deliver book reports.

Isn’t this a dinner party? That’s the problem: your generation doesn’t know how to eat together.

Then someone says the name of the book! You’re elated. Not only did you read, but your reading was worth it. You can go on to discuss the book as though you are a member of a book club. Your friend drops elements of the plot into conversation as though they’re actual events that happened in the world, and other people seem to understand these events’ causes and consequences. They add details. They hate or pity or simply judge the characters like they’re friends at the table. It all washes over you, like you read it too—no, because you read it, also.

But why are your friends giving the book a score? Worse, a 3.5 or 4 out of 5? You have to use decimals in the hundredths to place it above a zero. You hate the book so much you want to offer a negative integer. Math was always your thing, not reading. You interrupt to suggest the problem with millennials is we don’t do enough logic puzzles! The others ignore you, except the host, who jokingly asks if you were a mathlete, which you were by another name. Your neighbor, who is your husband, whispers you should probably read the book next time if you’re going to be in a book club.

Are you? A memory appears. Didn’t you click on the e-book link your friend sent you and download it to your phone, only to lose it among the photos in your downloads? Then, didn’t you have to get the new app, the one the library now uses, in order to read it? And when you found it hard to read the book on your phone, didn’t you buy an e-reader, except you immediately sat on its brittle screen? The book is due. You are on hold. It’s ready again!

You finally tell your friends the truth. “I can’t read these days.”

“We can read,” they insist. They say, “visual literacy” and “multiple intelligences.” They say, “Don’t tell us what we can’t do!” They smash collectible Penguin mugs over your head and use graphic book tees to smother you until you escape into a book.

“Reading saved my life,” you post, and you actually mean it.