She Is Not A Writer At All,

What Do You Do When You're No Longer The Hero Of Your Own Story?

At The Risk, Then, Of Being Shunned By Some Of My Gloomier Peers, I Venture To Tell You That Writers Work Like Demons, Suffer Greatly, And Are Also Happy, In Unmistakable Ways, Some Of The Time. If We Had No Knowledge Of Happiness, Our Novels Wouldn't Sufficiently Resemble Real Life. Some Of Us Are Even Made A Little Bit Happy, On Occasion, By The Writing Process Itself. I Mean, Really, If There Wasn't Some Sort Of Enjoyment To Be Derived, Would Any Of Us Keep Doing It?

I Was Living My Own Future And My Brother's Lost One As Well. I Represented Him Here Just As He Represented Me There, In Some Unguessable Other Place. His Move From Life To Death Might Resemble My Stepping Into The Kitchen - Into Its Soft Nowhere Quality And Foggy Hum. I Breathed The Dark Air. If I Had At That Moment A Sense Of Calm Kindly Death While My Heart Beat And My Lungs Expanded, He Might Know A Similar Sense Of Life In The Middle Of His Ongoing Death.

There Is Just This For Consolation: An Hour Here Or There, When Our Lives Seem, Against All Odds And Expectations, To Burst Open And Give Us Everything We've Ever Imagined , Though Everyone But Children (and Perhaps Even They) Knows These Hours Will Inevitably Be Followed By Others, Far Darker And More Difficult. Still, We Cherish The City, The Morning, We Hope, More Than Anything, For More. Heaven Only Knows Why We Love It So.

A Certain Slightly Cruel Disregard For The Feelings Of Living People Is Simply Part Of The Package. I Think A Writer, If Hes Any Good, Is Not An Entirely Benign Entity In The World.