I dreamt that I was verified.
Courting, “The Hills”
I’m of the age and gender where I am supposed to read presidential biographies and books about shipwrecks.
Fiction used to do it for me, but those days are over. Reading it feels more like a baseball game playing on a TV in the background rather than the key vocation of my life.
This might have something to do with the state of publishing, I usually tell myself, but today I will be honest and chalk it up to my age and my failed attempts at climbing Mt. Literature.
In that spirit, I want to share two memories that exemplify my devotion:
Once when I was in journalism school I approached the editor-in-chief of the newsmagazine of newsmagazines in Bryant Park, Manhattan. After fanboying him into a conversation, he asked me if I had any story ideas. I answered truthfully. I—can’t believe I said this—told him I was writing, not journalism, but fiction. That I was going to be a novelist. Sans MFA.
The look on his face was quite revealing and my j-school classmates later chastised me for my missed opportunity (as if I actually had a chance to get a story in the New Yorker) and general lack of EQ.
Second example of my attempting to fill the hole in my soul with golden calf of literary celebrity: I once met someone who had fact-checked stories by David Foster Wallace, the American writer who died in 2008 and of whom a short biopic was made, A24’s The End of the Tour.
I worshipped Wallace and was excited about the chance to shake hands with someone who had known him. After talking for a bit, it dawned on me that this experience was something more than fanboy catnip.
Wallace was a real human being. He hung himself. He was dead before I had ever read page of his work. And this person whom I was talking to had actual trauma because they used to have to follow-up on his reporting and have phone conversations with this dead, sainted writer guy whom I worshipped.
When I got my hands on a signed first edition of Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System, I still felt like Moses on Mount Sinai. It was only years later that I sold the novel at a Half-Price Books for $150, with which I then purchased a sandwich at Jimmy John’s, some more books, and, eventually, a lighter personality.
Back to the present: I visited a Barnes & Noble a few days ago and picked up a book by a literary author. The first sentence I read dripped of a pretension and writing tic I can no longer tolerate: in the middle of an anecdote, the author defined a word and traced out the various meanings of it before diving back into the narrative.
Literary writing has always been what it is. It’s just too damn literary for me now.
And at the other end of the publishing spectrum—the reader-friendly one—my appreciation is spoiled, too: the drugstore thriller.
Popcorn fiction rarely work on me. It’s like looking at a circuit board or something. Reading best-sellers feels like work to me.
The only fiction that I like is esoteric writing like that of the publishers New Directions and McNally Editions and certain types of autofiction. In other words, the weird stuff.
But when it comes to my chosen profession—writing and journalism—I identify a lot with Brad Pitt’s character in Moneyball: the highly-touted baseball prospect who turns out to be a dud.
Tough shit, I guess.
The silver lining is that all of this has taught me that I am more of a gambler purchasing a lotto scratcher than a writer. I accept that I have no power over my addiction: the low odds of getting a story accepted. The low odds of getting an agent. The low odds of my imaginary agent getting my bad manuscript published and the assumption of public adoration rather than scorn for my puerile thoughts and mediocre sentences.
The open secret of most creative writing classes is that this is true of most self-described writers. A lot of us are just gamblers, not artists.
In my case, if old age has brought a blessing it’s that I no longer take myself that seriously, and as a result, I no longer treat my writing as such.
It’s not that I’ve come to terms with it. If I could wish myself onto the best-seller list I would, but I have gotten better at not playing the mental slot machine.
Looking at circuit boards generally fills me with despair: the only reason to look at them is that they no longer work, and I have no idea what to do.
Great piece!