In this moment, it becomes increasingly obvious that Eggers wants to publicly examine the things he has taken for granted throughout his life. When he tells Laura that he and his friends used to call the rich high school in their town “Country Gay,” he fails to see why she finds this an insensitive thing to say. Or, rather, he doesn’t necessarily fail to see why she would find this “intolerant,” but he’s capable of ignoring the harmfulness of this joke because he has never been on the receiving end of this kind of quip. For him, “intolerance” wasn’t worth considering as a kid, since he grew up “without a sense of prejudice, firsthand or even in the abstract.” Of course, this is simply because he himself never had to experience prejudice. This doesn’t mean that prejudice didn’t exist in his town—he just never had to deal with it. Having said that, readers should keep in mind that this is Eggers’s memoir, meaning that he can present himself any way he wants. As such, the fact that he willingly reveals his naïve ideas about prejudice suggest that he recognizes them as problematic and wants to unpack them.