when we reach we
Lately I’m thinking it’s impossible to be dishonest in writing. The person you are shows through. Even when you lie, it shows that you lie.
This is probably true of more things than writing. You go on more than a few dates with the same guy and it’s hard to keep up the act. Not for lack of trying. No, never for lack of trying.
Diary entry from a year ago:
I know myself a little better now - I can be more specific than that.
Didactic. Puerile. Fluffy. Favoring sentimental non-sequiturs over anything with real meaning. Uninformed. Selfish. Amorphously ambitious. But it’s mine. I wrote this book. Every sentence is me. It may not be charming or correct, but it’s completely sincere. Even if it’s horrible. It’s horrible differently.
I was talking1 to Dad this morning about the trials and tribulations of dating as a beautiful and talented twentysomething literal idiot. Woe is me yada yada yada. Abruptly Dad goes: “I just want to say this now. If you’re 35 and you’re not married, that’s fine. There’s no such thing as being behind. It might seem like it, because that’s the world we live in, but there isn’t. You are who you are and you live how you live and you love who you love. The worst thing you could do is pick a person out of the fear that you won’t do any better, not out of the fearlessness of love. I’m saying it now and I’ll keep saying it. Not because I think you won’t find a partner but because I want you to know it from the very beginning.”
22 now. Fitzgerald published his first novel at 22. I read it during high school. It wasn’t very good. The guy comes off as a prick. And not the poor-baby-prep-school-pretensious-cool-pretty-boy type of prick. More like: you repel me and I am not going to read this. He died at 44. After publishing 3 other novels, 4 story collections, and 164 short stories.
“You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner.”
Well, I tried. Well, I failed. But I don’t need to be good. I don’t need to be great.
Effort, not talent. Effort alone I love.
I think of Justin Peck in 2002, moving alone from San Diego to NYC. To dance. It takes him 5 years to join the corps: the lowest ranking members of a ballet company. Another 6 to become a soloist. 4 after that to become NYCB’s resident choreographer. Where are we now? 2014?
You see how this goes?
An excerpt from page 89-90
I have, if I’m lucky, 60 lucid years ahead of me. If I read a book every2 day, that’s 21,900 books. That’s still finite. Gulp.
But even if I die tomorrow, I’m lucky. Born lucky. I got to be here. I get to be here with you.
https://whenwereachwe.gumroad.com/l/0
complaining