The Writer’s Life Is A Life Of

Life, In Her Experience, Had A Kind Of Velvet Luster. You Looked At Yourself From One Perspective And All You Saw Was Weirdness. Move Your Head A Little Bit, Though, And Everything Looked Reasonably Normal.

Even In An Intensely Mediated World, In A World That Offers At Least The Illusion Of Radical Self-invention And Radical Freedom Of Choice, I As A Novelist Am Drawn To The Things You Can't Get Away From. Because Much Of The Promise Of Radical Self-invention, Of Defining Yourself Through This Marvelous Freedom Of Choice, It's Just A Lie. It's A Lie That We All Buy Into, Because It Helps The Economy Run.

I Had A Viking Sense Of Entitlement To Whatever Provisions I Could Plunder.

The Correction, When It Finally Came, Was Not An Overnight Bursting Of A Bubble But A Much More Gentle Letdown, A Year-long Leakage Of Value From Key Financial Markets, A Contraction Too Gradual To Generate Headlines And Too Predictable To Seriously Hurt Anybody But Fools And The Working Poor.

Birds Were Like Dinosaurs' Better Selves. They Had Short Lives And Long Summers. We All Should Be So Lucky As To Leave Behind Such Heirs.