Brooklyn Was Like Philadelphia Made Better By

It's Very Liberating For Me To Realize That I Don't Have To Step Up To The Plate With A Plot That Involves The U.n. Security Council.

If You Read The Biographies Of People Who Have Written Good Books, You Often See The Point Where They Suddenly Come Into Themselves, And Those Weeks In The Spring Of 1997 Were When I Came Into Myself As A Writer. They Feel Like Some Of The Best Weeks Of Writing I’ll Ever Have. The Discovery That I Could Write Better About Something As Trivial As An Ordinary Family Dinner Than I Could About The Exploding Prison Population Of The United States, And The Corporatization Of American Life, And All The Other Things I’d Been Trying To Do, Was A Real Revelation.

Once There Are Good Sentences On The Page, I Can Feel A Loyalty To Them And Start Following Their Logic, And Take Refuge From Myself.

Depression, When It's Clinical, Is Not A Metaphor. It Runs In Families, And It's Known To Respond To Medication And To Counseling. However Truly You Believe There's A Sickness To Existence That Can Never Be Cured, If You're Depressed You Will Sooner Or Later Surrender And Say: I Just Don't Want To Feel Bad Anymore. The Shift From Depressive Realism To Tragic Realism, From Being Immobilized By Darkness To Being Sustained By It, Thus Strangely Seems To Require Believing In The Possibility Of A Cure.

It's Just A Matter Of Writing The Kind Of Book I Enjoy Reading. Something Better Be Happening At The Beginning, And Then On Every Page After, Or I Get Irritated.