There Is, After All, A Kind Of

When I Finally Gave Up Any Hope Of Doing Anything Representative Of The American Family, I Actually Seemed To Have Tapped Into Other People's Weirdness In That Way.

Imagine That Human Existence Is Defined By An Ache: The Ache Of Our Not Being, Each Of Us, The Center Of The Universe; Of Our Desires Forever Outnumbering Our Means Of Satisfying Them.

I Used To Think It Was Hard To Write, And I Still Find The Process More Or Less Unpleasant, But If I Know What I'm Doing It Rattles Along, Then The Rewrite Whips It Into Shape Rather Quickly.

Fiction, I Believed, Was The Transmutation Of Experiential Dross Into Linguistic Gold. Fiction Meant Taking Up Whatever The World Had Abandoned By The Road And Making Something Beautiful Out Of It.

But The First Lesson Reading Teaches Is How To Be Alone.