The Best Life For A Writer Is

How Often Do We Tell Our Own Life Story? How Often Do We Adjust, Embellish, Make Sly Cuts? And The Longer Life Goes On, The Fewer Are Those Around To Challenge Our Account, To Remind Us That Our Life Is Not Our Life, Merely The Story We Have Told About Our Life. Told To Others, But — Mainly — To Ourselves.

I Was Initially Planning To Write About Grief In Terms Of Eurydice And The Myth Thereof. By That Point The Overall Metaphor Of Height And Depth And Flat And Falling And Rising Was Coming Into Being In My Mind.

Well, They Each Seem To Do One Thing Well Enough, But Fail To Realize That Literature Depends On Doing Several Things Well At The Same Time.

You Would Think, Wouldn’t You, That If You Were The Child Of A Happy Marriage, Then You Ought To Have A Better Than Average Marriage Yourself – Either Through Some Genetic Inheritance Or Because You’d Learnt From Example? But It Doesn’t Seem To Work Like That. So Perhaps You Need The Opposite Example – To See Mistakes In Order Not To Make Them Yourself. Except This Would Mean That The Best Way For Parents To Ensure Their Children Have Happy Marriages Would Be To Have Unhappy Ones Themselves. So What’s The Answer?

You Can't Have A Novel Without Real, Believable People, And Once You Get Into Either Too Theoretical A Novel Or Too Philosophical A Novel, You Get Into The Dangers That The French Novel Has Discovered In The Past 50 Or 60 Years. And You Get Into A Sort Of Aridity. No, You Have To Have Real, Identifiable People To Whom The Reader Reacts In A Way As If They Were Real People.