A Dentist Is Only Half The Doctor

A Dentist Is Only Half The Doctor He Claims To Be.

I Always Knew From The Beginning That This Was The Only Way To Write Then We Came To The End - That It Had To Be In First - Person Plural If It Was Going To Illustrate How The Individual Becomes Part Of The Collective. I Had No Interest In Writing The Book In A More Conventional Voice. It Goes Back To That Fascination I Had With Telling A Story In Multiple Ways. It Was The Only Choice I Gave Myself, Really - I Said "this Is It, Pal. If You Can't Tell A Story This Way, You're Going To Have To Abandon The Book. Write It This Way Or Give Up."

The Thing Is, For Me, As A Fiction Writer, I Don't Think There's A Finer Testament To Our Lives Than This Thing That's Being Spurned - The Emotional Intelligence, The Ethics, The Beauty. It's All There. It's All So Fully Contained In A Novel That Succeeds. But At The Same Time, I Understand The Impulse To Put Away Childish Things.

Yet For All The Depression No One Ever Quit. When Someone Quit, We Couldn't Believe It. 'i'm Becoming A Rafting Instructor On The Colorado River,' They Said. 'i'm Touring College Towns With My Garage Band.' We Were Dumbfounded. It Was Like They Were From Another Planet. Where Had They Found The Derring-do? What Would They Do About Car Payments? We Got Together For Going Away Drinks On Their Final Day And Tried To Hide Our Envy While Reminding Ourselves That We Still Had The Freedom And Luxury To Shop Indiscriminately.

The Office Is A Romantic Enabler Because You're Always Around The Person You Have A Crush On. There's No Escape From, And Maybe No Desire To Escape From, Those Pressure-cooker Conditions. And There's An Automatic Series Of Things You Have To Talk About All The Time.