Cinemorphosis

Category: Literary Dispatches

  • The Mirage of Self-Invention in “Winter Dreams” and “The Overcoat”: 3 College Essay Prompts

    The Mirage of Self-Invention in “Winter Dreams” and “The Overcoat”: 3 College Essay Prompts

    Here are three essay prompts suitable for a 9-paragraph essay comparing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams” and Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” as stories of protagonists seduced and ultimately undone by illusions and magical thinking:

    1. The Price of the Dream: Compare how Dexter Green and Akaky Akakievich are destroyed by their obsession with an ideal—Dexter by the illusion of Judy Jones and material success, Akaky by the fantasy of respect and dignity through his overcoat. How do these dreams function as chimeras that blind them to the realities of their lives, and what commentary do the authors make about the cost of such illusions?

    2. Magic, Madness, and Misery: In both stories, the protagonists engage in magical thinking—believing that the acquisition of something (Judy Jones, a new coat) will transform their lives. Write an essay analyzing how Fitzgerald and Gogol expose the dangers of such thinking. How does each story depict the psychological unraveling that comes from chasing the unattainable?

    3. The Mirage of Self-Invention: Both Dexter and Akaky attempt to remake themselves—Dexter as a wealthy man worthy of Judy’s love, Akaky as a figure of dignity through his new coat. Compare how each character’s pursuit of self-reinvention leads to disappointment and loss. To what extent do their transformations represent a tragic misunderstanding of what it means to have real value in the world?

    Here are three detailed 9-paragraph essay outlines, each corresponding to one of the prompts comparing “Winter Dreams” by F. Scott Fitzgerald and “The Overcoat” by Nikolai Gogol. Each outline includes an introduction, thesis, body paragraphs with specific focus, and a conclusion.

    Essay Prompt 1: The Price of the Dream

    Compare how Dexter Green and Akaky Akakievich are destroyed by their obsession with an ideal. How do these dreams function as chimeras, and what commentary do the authors make about the cost of such illusions?

    Paragraph 1 – Introduction

    • Brief overview of both stories.
    • Introduce the concept of a chimera: an impossible dream that leads to downfall.
    • Thesis: In both “Winter Dreams” and “The Overcoat,” Fitzgerald and Gogol portray protagonists who fall prey to illusions that promise fulfillment but ultimately betray them, exposing the emotional and existential cost of chasing fantasies over reality.

    Paragraph 2 – Dexter’s Chimera: Judy Jones

    • Dexter’s obsession with Judy as the ultimate symbol of wealth, beauty, and success.
    • Judy as an ever-elusive figure—beautiful, but hollow.
    • Dexter’s belief that possessing her equals self-worth.

    Paragraph 3 – Akaky’s Chimera: The Overcoat

    • Akaky’s fantasy that a new overcoat will win him respect, status, and maybe even love.
    • The coat as a magical object, a transformational talisman.
    • His growing sense of identity tied solely to the garment.

    Paragraph 4 – The Tragic Consequences for Dexter

    • Dexter achieves wealth but not happiness.
    • Judy abandons him; he is left disillusioned.
    • Final realization: his dream was always a mirage.

    Paragraph 5 – The Tragic Consequences for Akaky

    • Akaky’s brief euphoria ends when the coat is stolen.
    • His decline and death—heartbroken, powerless, invisible.
    • Posthumous “revenge” as ghost = futile compensation.

    Paragraph 6 – Social and Cultural Commentary

    • Fitzgerald: critique of the American Dream and the commodification of love.
    • Gogol: satire of bureaucratic society, classism, and the dehumanization of the poor.

    Paragraph 7 – Emotional and Psychological Decay

    • Dexter’s emptiness and regret.
    • Akaky’s brief hope turns to despair and madness.
    • Both lose their sense of self to the illusion.

    Paragraph 8 – Comparative Analysis

    • Dexter’s dream is tied to class and romance; Akaky’s is tied to dignity and survival.
    • Both are naïve, driven, and ultimately crushed by the systems they trust.
    • Different cultural settings, same existential outcome.

    Paragraph 9 – Conclusion

    • Reiterate thesis: dreams without substance are deadly.
    • Final thought: Fitzgerald and Gogol warn us that illusions, when mistaken for meaning, don’t just fail—they devour.

    Essay Prompt 2: Magic, Madness, and Misery

    Analyze how Fitzgerald and Gogol expose the dangers of magical thinking and the psychological unraveling that results.

    Paragraph 1 – Introduction

    • Define “magical thinking” as irrational belief that one action or item can change one’s destiny.
    • Introduce both stories as cautionary tales.
    • Thesis: Through Dexter’s fixation on Judy and Akaky’s devotion to his coat, both stories reveal how magical thinking replaces reason with delusion, leading to madness and misery.

    Paragraph 2 – Magical Thinking Defined in Dexter’s World

    • Dexter believes love from Judy will redeem and elevate him.
    • Idealizes Judy as a goddess rather than a real person.
    • Sacrifices stability and happiness chasing her illusion.

    Paragraph 3 – Magical Thinking in Akaky’s Mind

    • Akaky treats the coat like a sacred relic.
    • Believes it will elevate him socially and emotionally.
    • Misplaces his hopes on material transformation.

    Paragraph 4 – Signs of Delusion in Dexter

    • Dexter ignores Judy’s flaws and cruelty.
    • Refuses real relationships in pursuit of a fantasy.
    • Fails to recognize the hollowness of his goal until it’s too late.

    Paragraph 5 – Signs of Delusion in Akaky

    • Treats the coat with religious reverence.
    • Withdraws emotionally once it’s gone.
    • Slips into a madness that leads to death and ghostly wandering.

    Paragraph 6 – Authors’ Techniques: Tone and Irony

    • Fitzgerald’s bittersweet irony in Dexter’s final reflections.
    • Gogol’s surrealism and grotesque humor to show Akaky’s madness.
    • Both use tone to critique the irrationality of obsession.

    Paragraph 7 – Societal Enablers

    • Dexter’s world glamorizes Judy and wealth.
    • Akaky’s world is indifferent and hostile.
    • Both societies encourage the pursuit of illusion over substance.

    Paragraph 8 – The Madness as Metaphor

    • Dexter’s disillusionment = emotional death.
    • Akaky’s literal death = psychological annihilation.
    • Both caution against letting fantasy substitute for human connection.

    Paragraph 9 – Conclusion

    • Restate thesis: magical thinking leads to psychological ruin.
    • Conclude: Fitzgerald and Gogol show that dreams, if not grounded in reality, become nightmares.

    Essay Prompt 3: The Mirage of Self-Invention

    Compare how each character’s pursuit of self-reinvention leads to disappointment and loss. What do the stories suggest about the pitfalls of attempting to create an identity based solely on appearances or fantasies?

    Paragraph 1 – Introduction

    • Introduce the idea of self-invention in modern literature.
    • Fitzgerald and Gogol explore identity construction through social aspiration.
    • Thesis: Both Dexter and Akaky seek to reinvent themselves through superficial means—romance and fashion—and are punished for mistaking external change for true transformation.

    Paragraph 2 – Dexter’s Quest for Identity

    • Dexter reinvents himself from working-class boy to elite golfer and businessman.
    • Sees Judy and wealth as validation of this new identity.
    • His success is built on surface, not substance.

    Paragraph 3 – Akaky’s Moment of Reinvention

    • The coat allows Akaky to imagine a new self.
    • Experiences respect and confidence for the first time.
    • His identity becomes fused with the garment.

    Paragraph 4 – The Collapse of Dexter’s Identity

    • Judy’s indifference shatters Dexter’s illusion.
    • He realizes he was always an outsider.
    • His “winter dreams” melt into regret and lost youth.

    Paragraph 5 – The Collapse of Akaky’s Identity

    • Without the coat, he reverts to invisibility.
    • Becomes physically and emotionally undone.
    • Dies shortly after, confirming the fragility of his identity.

    Paragraph 6 – False Metrics of Success

    • Dexter measured by money and social status.
    • Akaky measured by appearance and uniformity.
    • Both confuse external markers with inner worth.

    Paragraph 7 – Authorial Critique of Superficial Identity

    • Fitzgerald’s critique of American class mobility and romantic idealism.
    • Gogol’s satire of bureaucracy and materialism.
    • Both suggest true identity is not found through appearance or social approval.

    Paragraph 8 – Real versus Fabricated Identity

    • Dexter’s real self never aligned with his fantasy life.
    • Akaky’s core self was never built to survive public recognition.
    • Both built identities on unstable ground.

    Paragraph 9 – Conclusion

    • Reaffirm thesis: self-invention without self-awareness leads to collapse.
    • Conclude: Fitzgerald and Gogol show that chasing identity through externals dooms us to existential crisis.

  • The Perpetual Orgy of Reading and Writing

    The Perpetual Orgy of Reading and Writing

    After five decades of failed novels, it’s time to liberate myself from this grand folly. And in reading Mario Vargas Llosa’s love letter to Flaubert, The Perpetual Orgy, I’ve unearthed a few useful clues to explain my literary shipwreck.

    What I’ve learned is that Flaubert didn’t love novels—not the world-building, the character arcs, the intricate plots. To him, all that was humbug, a necessary evil. But he needed those scaffolds to reach his true fix—the lapidary, almost erotic thrill of wordcraft itself.

    I get that. I share Flaubert’s delight in sculpting sentences so precise, so gleaming, they feel like they’ve been pried from a pirate’s treasure chest. To witness language arranged with clarity and purpose is a divine experience—a moment where we no longer see the world through a glass darkly, but in all its lucid, dazzling glory.

    The problem? Flaubert had patience. I don’t.

    For him, painstakingly chiseling a 400-page novel into perfection was ecstasy. For me, it’s the literary equivalent of being handed a toothbrush and a can of Comet and told to scrub the entire Pacific Coast Highway from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

    That’s the difference. Well, that—and his staggering genius versus my conspicuous lack of it.

    As I pondered my crippling lack of patience, it dawned on me that while I love many books, what I might love even more—perhaps a little too much—are the flap copy descriptions wrapped around them like literary hors d’oeuvres.

    Take Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom, for example. I am obsessed with the novel, but I am no less obsessed with its book flap, which, in a few taut sentences, delivers a hit of pure linguistic euphoria.

    One paragraph, in particular, hit me like a lightning bolt:

    Shouldering biblical scholarship like a camcorder, Carrère re-creates the climate of the New Testament with the acumen of a seasoned storyteller. In the shoes of Saint Paul and Saint Luke, he plumbs the political, social, and mystical circumstances of their time, chronicling Paul’s evangelizing journeys around the Mediterranean and animating Luke, the self-effacing and elusive author of pivotal parts of the New Testament.

    That word—“plumb”—sent a shiver up my spine. A single verb, perfectly placed, evoking depth, mystery, excavation. It gave me the same adrenaline rush that my family gets from riding Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey at Universal Studios. I, however, despise amusement parks. My idea of a white-knuckle thrill ride? Loitering in a bookstore all day, devouring book jackets like a literary junkie.

    In this, at least, I share Flaubert’s reverence for language—the obsessive need to get every word exactly right, to make prose sing. What I don’t share is his patience.

    Which is why he wrote masterpieces, and I’m still standing in the bookstore, reading the packaging like a man afraid to unwrap the gift.

  • The Beatle, the Basement, and the Broken Dream: The Tragedy of a Paul McCartney Look-Alike

    The Beatle, the Basement, and the Broken Dream: The Tragedy of a Paul McCartney Look-Alike

    Reading Why We Write and seeing the world’s elite authors dissect the process that made them flourish forced me to confront a brutal truth: I am not a real writer.

    All those decades of grinding out abysmal, unreadable novels weren’t acts of literary craftsmanship—they were performance art, a cosplay so convincing that even I fell for it. I played the role of “the unappreciated novelist” with such dazzling commitment that I actually believed it. And what was my proof of authenticity? Misery and failure.

    Surely, I thought, only a true genius could endure decades of rejection, obscurity, and artistic suffering. Surely, my inability to produce a good novel was simply a sign that I was ahead of my time, too profound for this crass and unworthy world.

    Turns out, I wasn’t an undiscovered genius—I was just really, really bad at writing novels.

    Misery is a tricky con artist. It convinces you that suffering is the price of authenticity, that the deeper your despair, the more profound your genius. This is especially true for the unpublished writer, that tragic figure who has transformed rejection into a sacred ritual. He doesn’t just endure misery—he cultivates it, polishes it, wears it like a bespoke suit of existential agony. In his mind, every unopened response from a literary agent is further proof of his artistic martyrdom. He mistakes his failure for proof that he is part of some elite, misunderstood brotherhood, the kind of tortured souls who scowl in coffee shops and rage against the mediocrity of the world.

    And therein lies the grand delusion: the belief that suffering is a substitute for talent, that rejection letters are secret messages from the universe confirming his genius. This is not art—it’s literary cosplay, complete with the requisite brooding and self-pity. The unpublished writer isn’t just chasing publication; he’s chasing the idea of being the tortured artist, as if melancholy alone could craft a masterpiece. 

    Which brings us to the next guiding principle for Manuscriptus Rex’s rehabilitation: 

    The belief that the more miserable you are, the more authentic you become. This dangerous belief has its origins in a popular song–none other than Steely Dan’s brooding anthem, “Deacon Blues.”

    Like any good disciple, I’ve worshiped at this altar without even realizing it. I, too, have believed I’m the “expanding man”—growing wiser, deeper, more profound—while simultaneously wallowing in self-pity as a misunderstood loser. It’s a special kind of delusion, the spiritual equivalent of polishing a rusty trophy.

    To fully grasp this faith, I point you to The Wall Street Journal article, “How Steely Dan Created ‘Deacon Blues’” by Marc Myers. There, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker peel back the curtain on the song’s narrator—a man who could’ve just as easily been named Sad Sack Jones. He’s a suburban daydreamer, stuck in a dull, mediocre life, fantasizing that he’s a hard-drinking, sax-blowing rebel with women at his feet.

    Fagen admits the character was designed as a counterpoint to the unstoppable juggernaut of college football’s Crimson Tide—a gleaming machine of winners. In contrast, Deacon Blues is the anthem of the losers, crafted from a Malibu piano room with a sliver of Pacific Ocean peeking through the houses. Becker summed it up best: “Crimson Tide” dripped with grandiosity, so they invented “Deacon Blues” to glorify failure.

    And did it work. “Deacon Blues” became the unofficial patron saint for every self-proclaimed misfit who saw their own authenticity in his despair. He was our tragic hero—uncompromising, self-actualized, and romantic in his suffering.

    But then I read the article, and the spell broke. We were all suckered by a myth. Like the song’s narrator, we swallowed the fantasy of the “expanding man,” not realizing he was a con artist in his own mind. This isn’t a noble figure battling the world’s indifference—it’s a man marinating in his own mediocrity, dressed up in fantasies of scotch, saxophones, and self-destructive glamour.

    Walter Becker wasn’t subtle: the protagonist in “Deacon Blues” is a triple-L loser—an L-L-L Loser. Not a man on the cusp of greatness, but a man clutching a broken dream, pacing through a broken life. Fagen sharpened the knife: this is the guy who wakes up at 31 in his parents’ house and decides he’s suddenly going to “strut his stuff.”

    That sad, self-deluded basement dweller? That was the false prophet I’d built my personal religion around. A faith propped up by fantasies and self-sabotage.

    The man who inspired me wasn’t a misunderstood genius. He was a cautionary tale. A false path paved with jazz, liquor, and the comforting hum of failure.

    The slacker man-child isn’t just a tragic figure crooning in Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues.” No, he walks among us—lounges among us, really—and I knew one personally. His name was Michael Barley.

    We met in the late 1980s at my apartment swimming pool while I was teaching college writing in Bakersfield, a place that practically invents new ways to suffocate ambition. A failed musician who had dabbled in a couple of garage bands, Michael was in his early thirties and bore such a stunning resemblance to Paul McCartney that he could’ve landed a cushy gig as a Vegas impersonator if only ambition hadn’t been a foreign concept to him. He had it all: the same nose, the same mouth, the same melancholy eyes, even the same feathered, shoulder-grazing hair McCartney rocked in the ’70s and ’80s. Sure, he was shorter, stockier, and his cheeks were pockmarked with acne scars, but from a distance—and, really, only from a distance—he was Paul’s sad-sack doppelgänger.

    Michael leaned into this resemblance like a man squeezing the last drops from a dry sponge. At clubs, he’d loiter near the bar in a black blazer—his self-anointed “Beatles jacket”—wearing a slack-jawed half-smile, waiting for some starry-eyed woman to break the ice with, “Has anyone ever told you…?” His pickup strategy was less a plan and more a form of passive income. The women did all the work; he just had to stand there and exist. The hardest part of the night, I suspect, was pretending to be surprised when they made the McCartney connection for the hundredth time.

    And then he disappeared. For six months, nothing.

    When Michael resurfaced, he wasn’t Michael anymore. He was Julian French—an “English musician” with a secondhand accent and thirdhand dreams. He had fled to London, apparently thinking the UK was clamoring for chubby McCartney clones, and when that didn’t pan out (shocking, I know), he slunk back to Bakersfield to live in his parents’ trailer, which, in a tragicomic twist, was attached to an elementary school where his father worked as the janitor and moonlit as a locksmith.

    But Michael—excuse me, Julian—was undeterred. He insisted I call him by his new British name, swore up and down that his accent was authentic, and we returned to our old haunts. Now, at the gym and in nightclubs, I watched him work the crowd with his faux-charm and faux-accent, slinging cars and cell phones like a man with no Plan B. His Beatles face was his business card, his only sales pitch. He lived off the oxygen of strangers’ admiration, basking in the glow of almost being someone important.

    But here’s the truth: Michael—Julian—wasn’t hustling. He was coasting. His whole life was one long, lazy drift powered by the barest effort. He never married, never had a long-term relationship, never even pretended to have ambition. His greatest challenge was feigning humility when people gushed over his discount McCartney face.

    Time, of course, is undefeated. By middle age, Julian’s face began to betray him. His ears and nose ballooned, his jowls sagged, and the resemblance to Paul McCartney evaporated. Without his one-note gimmick, the magic died. The women, the friends, the sales—they all disappeared. So, back to the trailer he went, tail tucked, learning the locksmith trade from his father, as if turning keys could unlock the door to whatever life he’d wasted.

    And me? I didn’t judge him. I couldn’t.

    Because deep down, I knew I was just as susceptible to the same delusion—the myth of the “Expanding Man.” That romantic fantasy of being a misunderstood artist, swaddled in self-pity, wandering through life with the illusion of authenticity. Like the anti-hero in “Deacon Blues,” Julian wasn’t building a life; he was building a narrative to justify his stagnation.

    And wasn’t I doing the same? By the late ’90s, I was approaching 40, professionally afloat but personally shipwrecked—emotionally underdeveloped, the cracks in my personality widening into canyons. I, too, was toeing that fine line between winner and loser, haunted by the possibility that I’d wasted years buying into the same seductive lie that trapped Julian.

    That’s the genius of the “Deacon Blue’s” Doctrine—a religion as potent as opium. It sanctifies self-pity, addiction, and delusions of grandeur, repackaging them into a noble code of suffering. It convinces you that stewing in your own misery is a virtue, that being a failure makes you authentic, and that the world just isn’t sophisticated enough to appreciate your “depth.”

    But here’s the truth no one tells you: eventually, life hands you your ass on a stick. That’s when you find out which side of the line you’re really on.

  • The Book That Ruined My Life (and Made It Worth Living)

    The Book That Ruined My Life (and Made It Worth Living)

    Alice Flaherty opens The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain with a quote from Roland Barthes: “A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.”

    Problem? That word hardly does justice to the affliction. A problem is misplacing your car keys or forgetting to pay the water bill. What I have is more like a life swallowed whole, a case study in obsession so severe it borders on the pathological. Writing isn’t just a habit; it’s an all-consuming parasite, a compulsion that, in a just world, would require a 12-step program and a sponsor who confiscates my pens at night.

    But since no one is shipping me off to a remote cabin with nothing but an axe and a survival manual, I’ll have to settle for less extreme interventions—like seeking solace in Flaherty’s musings on the so-called writing “problem.”

    As it turns out, my affliction has a clinical name. Flaherty informs me that neurologists call this compulsion hypergraphia—the unrelenting urge to write. In their view, I suffer from an overactive communication drive, a neurochemical malfunction that ensures my brain is forever churning out words, whether the world wants them or not.

    Yet Flaherty, a physician and a neuroscientist, doesn’t merely dissect the neurology; she also acknowledges the rapture, the ecstasy, the fever dream of writing. She describes the transformative power of literature, how great writers fall under its spell, ascending from the mundane to the sacred, riding some metaphorical magic carpet into the great beyond.

    For me, that moment of possession came courtesy of A Confederacy of Dunces. It wasn’t enough to read the book. I had to write one like it. The indignation, the hilarity, the grotesque majesty of Ignatius J. Reilly burrowed into my psyche like a virus, convincing me I had both a moral duty and the necessary delusions of grandeur to bestow a similarly deranged masterpiece upon humanity.

    And I wasn’t alone. Working at Jackson’s Wine & Spirits in Berkeley, my coworkers and I read Dunces aloud between customers, our laughter turning the store into a kind of literary revival tent. Curious shoppers asked what was so funny, we evangelized, they bought copies, and they’d return, eyes gleaming with gratitude. Ignatius, with his unhinged pontifications, made the world seem momentarily less grim. He proved that literature wasn’t just entertainment—it was an antidote to the slow suffocation of daily life.

    Before Dunces, I thought books were just stories. I didn’t realize they could act as battering rams against Plato’s cave, blasting apart the shadows and flooding the place with light.

    During my time at the wine store, we read voraciously: The Ginger Man, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Moravia’s Contempt, Camus’ Notebooks, Borges’ labyrinthine tales. We never said it out loud, but we all understood—life was a dense fog of absurdity and despair, and books were our MREs, the intellectual rations that kept us alive for another day in the trenches.

    Books were our lifeline. They lifted our spirits, fortified our identities, and sharpened our minds like whetstones against the dull blade of existence. They turned us into a ragtag band of literary zealots, clutching our dog-eared pages like relics, singing the praises of Great Literature with the fervor of the Whos in Whoville—except instead of roasting beast, we feasted on Borges and Camus.

    Which brings us to Flaherty’s lament: the Internet is muscling books out of existence, and when books go, so does a vital piece of our humanity.

    What would my memories of Jackson’s be without the shared reverence for literature? It wasn’t just a passion; it was the glue that bound us to each other and to our customers. The conversations, the discoveries, the camaraderie—none of it could be replicated by an algorithm or a meme.

    How can I not think of this in the context of a country still staggering through its post-pandemic hangover of rage, paranoia, and despair? Where the love of books has been trampled beneath an endless scroll of digital sludge, and where human connection has been reduced to strangers launching spiteful grenades at each other across social media—those lawless arenas ruled by soulless tech lords, their pockets fat with the profits of our collective decline?

    Flaherty confesses that her need to dissect the spark of writing—the thing that makes it so irrepressibly human—was an uncontrollable urge, one that made her question whether she suffered from hypergraphia, postpartum mania, or some deeper compulsion to explore what she calls the “Kingdom of Sorrow” after the devastating loss of her prematurely born twin boys. Her search for the root of her writing obsession reminded me of Rainer Maria Rilke’s advice in Letters to a Young Poet: the only writing worth doing is that which one cannot not do.

    Beyond hypergraphia—an affliction rare enough to keep it from becoming a trendy self-diagnosis—Flaherty also tackles the more mundane but far more common malady of writer’s block. She attributes it to mood disorders, procrastination, repressed anxieties, and perhaps a sprinkle of nihilism. I used to wrestle with writer’s block myself, particularly between short stories, back when I entertained the delusion that I might carve out a name for myself in literary fiction. But whenever I think of writer’s block, I think of the one person I’d most like to share a meal with: Fran Lebowitz.

    Lebowitz’s writer’s block has lasted for decades, so long, in fact, that she’s upgraded it to a “writer’s blockade.” If Blaise Pascal was an acid-tongued intellectual defending faith, Lebowitz is the sharp-tongued patron saint of the New York literati, delivering high-caliber cultural commentary with the precision of a diamond-tipped drill. That she doesn’t write is a cosmic joke. That people care she doesn’t write is part of her legend. That her off-the-cuff witticisms are more electrifying than most books in print makes her, without question, my literary idol.

    And yet, my devotion to Lebowitz only reveals the terminal nature of my writing affliction. If a genie granted me the chance to swap lives with her—to tour the world, bask in standing ovations, and deliver effortless, unfiltered cultural critique to sold-out crowds—but on the condition that I could never write another book, I would turn it down without hesitation. This refusal confirms the depths of my sickness. In this hypothetical scenario, books themselves are mere shadows compared to the brilliance of Lebowitz’s conversation. And yet, here I am, clinging to the shadows, convinced that somewhere in those pages, I will find the thing that makes existence bearable.

    Surely, no specialist can diagnose a disease like this, much less cure it.

    Reading Flaherty’s sharp and introspective book, I found myself circling a familiar question: is the urge to write both a pathology and a gift? This led me straight to The Savage God, A. Alvarez’s bleak yet compelling account of depression, suicide, and literature. Across history, writers afflicted by melancholy, madness, or sheer existential despair have been cast as tragic geniuses, indulgent sinners, or misunderstood romantics, depending on the prevailing religious and literary winds.

    Take Sylvia Plath, the confessional poet who sealed her fate at thirty, or John Kennedy Toole, the tortured author of A Confederacy of Dunces, who asphyxiated himself at thirty-one. Conventional wisdom holds that Toole’s despair stemmed from his inability to publish his novel, but Tom Bissell, in “The Uneasy Afterlife of A Confederacy of Dunces,” suggests a more tangled story—one of creeping paranoia and the pressures of academia, where Toole, at twenty-two, was the youngest professor in Hunter College’s history.

    Like his doomed creator, Ignatius J. Reilly is possessed by the need to write. His screeds, stitched together from the wisdom of Boethius, function less as arguments and more as the existential flailings of a man convinced that writing will bring him salvation. He writes because he must, the way a fish swims—to stay alive.

    Bissell’s most cutting insight isn’t about Toole’s life, but about his novel’s fundamental flaw: Dunces is riddled with indulgences—flabby with adverbs, allergic to narrative structure, and populated with characters so exaggerated they teeter on the edge of cartoonhood. He argues that Dunces is “a novel that might have been considerably more fun to write than it is to read.” This line stopped me cold.

    Why? Because Dunces was my Rosetta Stone, my gateway drug to the idea of becoming a comic novelist. And yet here was the brutal truth: the very book that set me on this path was a wreck of undisciplined excess. If Dunces ruined my life, it did so not because it failed, but because I absorbed its flaws as gospel. I inhaled its bloated exuberance, its unshackled absurdity, and made it my literary template.

    To undergo a religious experience from a flawed book is to risk a kind of artistic contamination—you don’t just inherit its brilliance, you inherit its sins. My writing compulsion is perhaps nothing more than Dunces’ worst tendencies metastasized in my brain.

    And so, as a recovering writing addict, I am forced to sit with this painful revelation and digest it like a bad meal—one that demands an industrial-strength antacid.

    At the beginning of this book, I claimed that A Confederacy of Dunces ruined my life. It was a ridiculous, melodramatic statement—fatuous, even. But after considering its messy influence over my work, I can’t help but think: there’s more truth in it than I’d like to admit.

  • Greatness Adjacent: My Life as a Literary Delusionist

    Greatness Adjacent: My Life as a Literary Delusionist

    After churning out one literary failure after another across five decades, I’m forced to ask myself: Is my perseverance a virtue, the kind of tenacity that gets celebrated in self-help books and motivational speeches? Or is it a pathological compulsion, a lifelong affliction keeping me from my real calling—whatever that may be? And if the notion of a “true calling” is just a fairy tale we tell ourselves to make existence more bearable, then perhaps I should at least free up some time to do the dishes.

    To grapple with these existential questions, I turned to Stephen Marche’s slim but merciless On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer. His thesis? Failure isn’t an anomaly in the writing life—it’s the default setting. The occasional success, when it happens, is a fluke, an accident, a glitch in the system. Failure, on the other hand, is the well-worn coat writers wrap themselves in, the skin they inhabit. And mind you, he’s not even talking about unpublished failures like myself—he’s extending this bleak diagnosis to the published ones, the so-called “real writers.”

    Marche backs up his grim pronouncement with numbers: Three hundred thousand books are published every year in the United States, and only a microscopic fraction make a dent in public consciousness. It doesn’t matter how famous you are—your book is still more likely to sink into obscurity than to make any meaningful impact. If you’re not sufficiently depressed yet, Marche then drags in examples from literary history: beloved writers who, despite their modern-day veneration, spent their lives begging for money, wallowing in debtors’ prisons, or drinking themselves into oblivion.

    Marche’s goal with this book—barely longer than a grocery receipt—is to strip writing of its romantic pretensions. Forget divine inspiration, artistic calling, or the fantasy of making it; writing is just stubbornness on repeat. But here’s where he really twists the knife: That whole narrative about failure eventually leading to success? Utter nonsense. “The internet loves this arc,” he writes, “low then high; first perseverance, then making it all; all struggle redeemed; the more struggle the more redemption. It’s pure bullshit.” The truth? Most writers fail, period. And even the rare successes are plagued by existential misery—forever misunderstood, chronically isolated, and shackled to a relentless hunger for recognition that can never truly be satisfied.

    Worse still, even the successful ones live in constant anxiety over whether they’ll ever be successful again. Literary triumphs don’t lead to security; they lead to paranoia. Marche describes the “psychology of failure” as an inescapable affliction that forces writers to cling to the smallest scraps of validation, inflating minor achievements to salve their chronic inadequacy. His case study? A professor who once had a letter published in The Times Literary Supplement and framed it on his wall like a Nobel Prize, using it as a talisman against irrelevance.

    Reading On Writing and Failure is like stepping into a room full of my own ghosts—writers far more accomplished than I am, yet still plagued by the same desperate need for affirmation, the same self-inflicted torment, the same inability to simply be content. It’s almost comforting, in a bleak sort of way. All those books about “maximizing happiness,” “daily habits of highly effective people,” and “radical gratitude” are useless against the unyielding hunger of the literary ego. If failure is the writer’s natural habitat, then perhaps the real victory isn’t in succeeding but in learning to fail with style.

    What struck me most about Marche’s book is just how desperate writers are for validation—so desperate, in fact, that we cling to the tiniest scraps of approval like a Jedi clutching a lightsaber in a dark alley. As proof that I was destined for literary greatness, I have spent the last three decades obsessively revisiting a single one-hour phone conversation I had in 1992 with the retired literary agent Reid Boates. At the time, I was hawking The Man Who Stopped Dating, a novel the publishing industry (correctly) determined should never see the light of day. But Boates, to my eternal delight, told me my synopsis knocked his socks off. That one phrase sent me soaring. If a mere synopsis could strip a seasoned agent of his footwear, surely I was on the brink of glory.

    Perhaps the memento I cherish even more is a letter I received from Samuel Wilson Fussell, author of Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder. After devouring his memoir, I wrote him a fan letter detailing my own bodybuilding misadventures and name-dropping a few of the lunatics I recognized from his book. Fussell responded enthusiastically, telling me that he and his friends had read my letter out loud and collapsed to the floor, clutching their bellies in laughter. Over the years, I’ve sometimes wondered: Were they laughing with me… or at me? But in the moment, it didn’t matter. In my mind, Fussell’s response confirmed what I already knew—I was a man of literary consequence, a peer among published authors and esteemed literary agents, a rising star on the precipice of greatness.

    And here’s the kicker: I can still remember the pure, uncut euphoria I felt after talking to Reid Boates and receiving Fussell’s letter, and I am convinced—convinced—that the high would have been no greater had I seen my best-selling novel displayed in the window of a Manhattan bookstore.

    Marche is right. My neediness was so profound that I mistook these small flashes of recognition as irrefutable proof of my imminent rise to literary celebrity. But unlike Marche, I find no solace in knowing that I am not alone in this affliction. I can only speak for myself: I am a writing addict. My compulsion produces nothing of value, it embarrasses me, and I am in desperate need of rehabilitation. And so, in a cruel twist of irony, I write about my recovery from writing—even though my so-called recovery demands that I stop writing altogether. My misery, therefore, is guaranteed.

  • College Essay Prompt: Mental Breakdown in a Society of Screens and Parasocial Relationships

    College Essay Prompt: Mental Breakdown in a Society of Screens and Parasocial Relationships

    Prompt:

    In the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive,” Lacie Pound is a woman obsessed with improving her social credit score in a dystopian world where every interaction is rated. Beneath the pastel filter and performative smiles lies a darker exploration of human identity, self-worth, and the collapse of authentic connection. Your task is to write a 1,700-word analytical essay exploring Lacie’s psychological and emotional breakdown in this episode, and to determine whether her collapse is directly caused by the pressures of social media—or whether these platforms merely accelerate a personal unraveling that was already inevitable.

    To support your analysis, draw on the following sources:

    • The Social Dilemma (Netflix documentary)
    • Jonathan Haidt’s essay, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid”
    • Sherry Turkle’s TED Talk, “Connected But Not Alone”

    As you craft your argument, consider the following themes:

    • The role of external validation in shaping identity
    • The psychological consequences of living a curated digital life
    • The connection between social media engagement and rising anxiety, loneliness, and inauthenticity
    • The tension between societal pressures and individual vulnerability

    In your response, be sure to define what it means to “nosedive” emotionally and psychologically in a world built on ratings, algorithms, and hyper-performative culture. Does Lacie’s collapse function as a cautionary tale about social media, or is it more accurately read as an exposure of underlying personal fragility that the digital world simply brings to the surface?

    Sample Thesis Statements:

    Thesis 1: Lacie Pound’s breakdown in “Nosedive” is not simply caused by social media, but rather by a deeper psychological dependency on external approval that predates the digital age; in this light, social media acts less as the villain and more as the mirror, reflecting and magnifying insecurities that already governed her identity.

    Thesis 2: While Lacie’s nosedive appears personal, Black Mirror, The Social Dilemma, and Haidt’s essay collectively argue that her mental collapse is symptomatic of a broader cultural condition: one in which algorithmic design, curated self-presentation, and digital tribalism erode authentic self-worth and create a climate of chronic social anxiety.

    Thesis 3: Lacie’s descent into psychological ruin is the inevitable outcome of a society that commodifies likability; as Turkle and Haidt suggest, the illusion of connection offered by digital platforms disguises a deeper emotional isolation that transforms people into performers—and performance into pathology.

    Paragraph 1 – Introduction

    • Open with a hook: describe a real-world example of someone spiraling due to social media pressure.
    • Introduce “Nosedive” and its relevance to today’s digital culture.
    • Define the metaphor of a psychological “nosedive” as a collapse of self-worth triggered by performance anxiety and social failure.
    • Present core question: Is Lacie’s breakdown caused by social media itself, or does it reveal deeper insecurities?
    • End with a clear thesis: Lacie’s unraveling is both personal and systemic—her need for validation reflects broader societal patterns of technology-driven identity performance, but her fragility also exposes how digital tools prey on unresolved emotional vulnerabilities.

    Paragraph 2 – The World of “Nosedive”: Ratings as a Proxy for Self-Worth

    • Describe the dystopian rating system in “Nosedive”.
    • Show how every interaction is gamified, creating a society obsessed with likeability metrics.
    • Link this to The Social Dilemma’s critique of algorithm-driven behavior modification.
    • Argue that this environment creates constant self-surveillance, leading to emotional volatility.

    Paragraph 3 – Lacie’s Performance Addiction

    • Analyze Lacie’s early behavior: carefully scripted interactions, forced smiles, rehearsed expressions.
    • Discuss how her self-worth becomes entirely contingent on digital perception.
    • Use Turkle’s “Connected but Alone” idea—she’s always performing but never truly known.
    • Argue that social media didn’t create this need, but it made it pathological.

    Paragraph 4 – The Spiral Begins: Social Failure and Systemic Collapse

    • Walk through Lacie’s descent—missteps leading to plummeting scores.
    • Show how one social miscue becomes a digital contagion, amplifying shame and exclusion.
    • Reference The Social Dilemma’s point that digital feedback loops intensify emotional reactions and punish deviation.
    • Suggest that Lacie’s environment leaves no room for recovery or grace.

    Paragraph 5 – Internal Fragility: Lacie’s Preexisting Insecurities

    • Explore signs that Lacie is already emotionally unstable before the social collapse.
    • Her obsession with pleasing her childhood friend, her rehearsed conversations—all suggest deep-seated neediness.
    • Connect this to Haidt’s argument that our culture has created emotionally fragile individuals by overprotecting and under-challenging them.
    • Argue that social media simply amplifies what’s already fragile.

    Paragraph 6 – External Validation and the Collapse of the Authentic Self

    • Explore how Lacie no longer knows what she wants—she’s completely shaped by other people’s expectations.
    • Bring in Turkle’s argument: constant performance erodes the self; connection becomes simulation.
    • Use The Social Dilemma to show how this is by design—platforms profit from our insecurity.
    • Argue that Lacie’s breakdown is the result of living entirely outside of herself.

    Paragraph 7 – Public Spaces, Public Shame

    • Analyze the role of public humiliation in Lacie’s fall—airport scene, wedding meltdown.
    • Show how social media culture weaponizes public space—cancellations, social scoring, dogpiling.
    • Reference Haidt’s observation about outrage culture and public reputational death.
    • Argue that Lacie’s failure is no longer private—it’s performatively punished by the crowd.

    Paragraph 8 – Final Breakdown: Liberation or Madness?

    • Examine Lacie’s final moments in the prison cell—unfiltered, foul-mouthed, finally honest.
    • Is this a breakdown, or a breakthrough?
    • Connect to Turkle’s point that authenticity can emerge only when we step away from performance.
    • Suggest that Lacie’s collapse may be tragic, but it’s also a moment of reclaimed selfhood.

    Paragraph 9 – Synthesis: Personal Fragility Meets Systemic Pressure

    • Reconcile the two sides of the argument: the personal and the structural.
    • Social media didn’t invent Lacie’s insecurities, but it created a high-pressure ecosystem where they became catastrophic.
    • Digital culture accelerates emotional collapse by monetizing validation and punishing imperfection.
    • Reinvention in a digital world is nearly impossible—every misstep is documented, judged, and immortalized.

    Paragraph 10 – Conclusion

    • Reaffirm thesis: Lacie’s nosedive is a cautionary tale about both social media and emotional fragility.
    • Summarize key insights from The Social Dilemma, Haidt, and Turkle.
    • End with a broader reflection: In a world obsessed with performance and visibility, real freedom may lie in being able to live—and fail—without an audience.
  • College Essay Prompt for African-American History as the Study of Reinvention:

    College Essay Prompt for African-American History as the Study of Reinvention:

    Freedom, Reinvention, and the Sunken Place: Escaping the Invisible Chains

    In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Get Out (dir. Jordan Peele), and Black Panther (dir. Ryan Coogler), characters and real individuals grapple with the meaning of freedom in a world designed to deny it—physically, psychologically, and spiritually. Each text explores how Black identity is shaped, erased, or reclaimed through processes of reinvention, and each engages, either directly or symbolically, with what Jordan Peele calls The Sunken Place—a metaphor for the internalized oppression, silencing, and detachment that results from systemic racism and cultural erasure.

    Write an essay that analyzes how freedom and reinvention function as both personal and political acts of resistance in these works. How do Douglass, Malcolm X, Chris (in Get Out), and characters like Killmonger or T’Challa in Black Panther confront or escape their respective “Sunken Places”? What does reinvention require of them—and what must be left behind?

    In your response, define what the Sunken Place means as a rhetorical or metaphorical concept and explore how it illuminates the stakes of identity, autonomy, and liberation.

    ***

    Here’s a 10-paragraph essay outline designed to help a student develop a tightly structured and analytically rich response to that prompt. The structure begins with conceptual framing, moves through each major text and figure, and ends with synthesis and reflection.

    Title: “Reaching for the Light: Reinvention, Resistance, and the Escape from the Sunken Place”

    Paragraph 1 – Introduction

    • Open with the metaphor of The Sunken Place from Get Out—a cinematic depiction of psychological paralysis and systemic erasure.
    • Define The Sunken Place broadly: not just a horror trope, but a rhetorical and symbolic stand-in for how oppression internalizes silence and disempowerment.
    • Introduce the concept of reinvention as a tool of resistance, a means to escape this paralyzing condition.
    • Preview argument: In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Get Out, and Black Panther, protagonists engage in radical self-reinvention to reclaim their freedom. These transformations demand sacrifice, challenge identity, and illuminate how both personal liberation and political power begin with a refusal to remain passive in the Sunken Place.

    Paragraph 2 – Theoretical Frame: The Sunken Place as Metaphor

    • Analyze the Sunken Place as a metaphor for internalized racism, dehumanization, and enforced passivity.
    • Link to historical experiences: slavery, racial profiling, consumer commodification of Black culture.
    • Assert that freedom in these texts is not just physical emancipation but psychic and symbolic resurrection from silence, invisibility, and objectification.

    Paragraph 3 – Frederick Douglass: Literacy as Escape from the Sunken Place

    • Discuss Douglass’s early life as one of enforced ignorance and psychological domination.
    • His reinvention begins with learning to read, which disrupts the “narrative” imposed on him.
    • Emphasize how Douglass breaks out of his own Sunken Place by reclaiming his voice and narrating his own story—literally writing himself into existence.

    Paragraph 4 – Malcolm X: From Detroit Red to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz

    • Examine Malcolm X’s multiple transformations—his shift from street hustler to Nation of Islam minister, and finally to a global human rights activist.
    • Reinvention is both self-salvation and political resistance.
    • His Sunken Place is multifaceted: criminality, internalized racial hatred, ideological dogmatism—all of which he confronts and evolves beyond.

    Paragraph 5 – Chris in Get Out: Reclaiming the Self through Violent Awakening

    • Chris is literally paralyzed and silenced in the Sunken Place by a white liberal family that commodifies his Black body.
    • His escape is visceral and physical—violence becomes a necessary form of resistance.
    • Reinvention for Chris means reasserting autonomy and rejecting white narratives of politeness, gratitude, and submission.

    Paragraph 6 – T’Challa: Reimagining Black Leadership Beyond Isolationism

    • T’Challa begins as a traditionalist king reluctant to change.
    • His “Sunken Place” is Wakanda’s self-imposed isolation—a kind of moral paralysis rooted in fear.
    • His reinvention is political: choosing to share Wakanda’s resources and confront the legacy of colonialism.

    Paragraph 7 – Killmonger: Reinvention through Anger and Ancestral Grief

    • Killmonger’s transformation is driven by rage, abandonment, and inherited trauma.
    • His Sunken Place is one of cultural disconnection—he knows his history only through pain.
    • He reinvents himself as a revolutionary but fails to escape the logic of domination; his tragedy lies in confusing conquest with liberation.

    Paragraph 8 – Reinvention and Sacrifice: What Must Be Left Behind

    • Explore what each character sacrifices in the process of reinvention: Douglass gives up anonymity, Malcolm gives up ideological certainty, Chris gives up emotional passivity, T’Challa gives up tradition, Killmonger gives up his life.
    • Reinvention is costly—freedom demands disillusionment and courage, not fantasy.

    Paragraph 9 – Synthesis: Reinvention as Resistance in the Age of Erasure

    • Compare across texts: all figures must see the Sunken Place before they can escape it.
    • Reinvention is both personal (psychological awakening) and political (new structures of meaning and action).
    • Assert that these works challenge readers and viewers to recognize the forces that lull people into compliance—and offer blueprints for rupture.

    Paragraph 10 – Conclusion

    • Reaffirm central idea: freedom is not given but seized—through literacy, defiance, vision, and painful transformation.
    • Emphasize that escaping the Sunken Place is not a singular act but an ongoing refusal to be erased.
    • End with a reflection: in a society increasingly shaped by algorithms and narratives beyond one’s control, these texts serve as urgent reminders that reinvention is resistance—and resistance is freedom.

    Sample Thesis Statements:

    Thesis 1:

    While Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X reinvent themselves through literacy and faith to reclaim their voices from the Sunken Place of internalized inferiority, Get Out and Black Panther reimagine the struggle for freedom through speculative storytelling that dramatizes how liberation depends on disrupting not just physical systems of oppression, but the psychological architecture that keeps people silent, docile, or divided.

    Thesis 2:

    All four works demonstrate that true freedom is impossible without self-reinvention, but they also expose the danger of losing oneself in the process: Douglass risks alienation from both enslaved and free communities, Malcolm X is forced to reckon with ideological betrayal, Chris must commit violence to wake from the Sunken Place, and Killmonger’s tragic reinvention reveals what happens when liberation is pursued without healing.

    Thesis 3:

    The Sunken Place operates across these works as a metaphor for the psychological captivity that persists even after physical chains are broken; Douglass, Malcolm X, Chris, and T’Challa all confront this inner captivity, and each suggests in different ways that reinvention is not a luxury of freedom—but its precondition.

  • Manuscriptus Rex: My Life as a Delusional Writing Addict

    Manuscriptus Rex: My Life as a Delusional Writing Addict

    I am a writing addict, at least in part, because I was indoctrinated by the twin cults of positive thinking and unrelenting perseverance. Never quit. Fight like hell. Success is inevitable if you just want it badly enough. And if it doesn’t come? Well, then you’re just not a real American.

    By the time I hit kindergarten, I was a true believer in the gospel of hard work. My worldview was a Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from children’s books, Charles Atlas bodybuilding ads wedged between comic book panels, and the propaganda of Captain Kangaroo. The formula was clear: effort equals triumph. I swallowed this doctrine whole, with the blind conviction of a kid who thought that eating all his vegetables would one day grant him the ability to fly.

    My optimism knew no bounds. It was untethered, soaring on the helium of pop-culture platitudes. The Little Engine That Could had me whispering “I think I can” like a monk chanting a holy incantation, convinced that sheer willpower and enough push-ups could bulldoze any obstacle. It didn’t occur to me that sometimes you think you can, but you absolutely cannot—and that no amount of stubborn persistence will turn a delusion into destiny.

    And then came the night of October 16, 1967—a date I would later remember as the day the universe gave me a cosmic swirly. Twelve days before my sixth birthday, I sat cross-legged in front of the TV, ready to revel in another episode of my favorite show, The Monkees. But what played out before me was a betrayal so deep it made Santa Claus feel like a Ponzi scheme.

    The episode, “I Was a 99-lb. Weakling,” featured my hero, Micky Dolenz, getting steamrolled by Bulk, a slab of human granite played by Mr. Universe himself, Dave Draper. Bulk wasn’t just big—he was the walking embodiment of every Charles Atlas ad come to life, the muscle-bound colossus I had been taught to revere. And right on cue, Brenda, the bikini-clad goddess of the beach, ditched Micky for Bulk without so much as a backward glance.

    This was a crisis of faith. How could the Monkees’ resident goofball, my spiritual avatar, lose to a guy who looked like he bench-pressed telephone poles for fun? Desperate to reclaim his dignity, Micky enrolled in Weaklings Anonymous, where he endured a training montage so ludicrous it made Rocky Balboa’s look like a casual Pilates class. He lifted weights the size of Buicks. He chugged fermented goat milk curd—a punishment so grotesque it could only be described as liquefied despair. He even sold his drum set. His very essence, his identity, was on the chopping block, all in pursuit of the almighty muscle.

    But the final twist? Brenda changed her mind. Just as Micky was emerging from his trial by whey protein, she dropped Bulk like a bad habit and swooned over a pencil-necked intellectual—a guy who looked like he could barely lift a library book, but there he was, nose buried in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Brenda, the same woman who had once melted for a walking slab of muscle, now found transcendence in a man contemplating lost time in a cork-lined room.

    It was then that the tectonic plates of my worldview shifted. Muscles weren’t the real source of power—books were. The secret wasn’t in deadlifts or protein shakes but in the right combination of words, strung together with enough elegance, insight, and authority to bend the universe to your will. The revelation landed with the force of a divine decree: if you wanted to shape the world, you didn’t need biceps—you needed prose.

    That night, my inner writing demon was born. It didn’t arrive with fanfare but stealthily, like an assassin—hijacking my ambitions, whispering to me that if I truly wanted to matter, I needed to trade in my devotion to squat racks for an obsession with syntax. The real alphas weren’t the ones flexing on the beach; they were the ones commanding attention through the written word, weaving sentences so powerful they made bikini-clad goddesses switch allegiances overnight.

    ***

    Picture a five-year-old boy glued to The Monkees, absorbing every absurd twist and turn, when suddenly—a revelation. Not from a heroic feat, a rock anthem, or a daring stunt, but from a pencil-necked geek buried in Remembrance of Things Past. The sheer audacity of it! This bookish weakling wasn’t just reading—he was brandishing literature like a weapon, as if cracking open Proust conferred an instant intellectual throne.

    That moment rewired my brain and began my transformation into Manuscriptus Rex. I wanted that kind of power. I wanted to be indelible, undeniable, and necessary—a man whose words carried weight, whose sentences etched themselves into the fabric of cultural consciousness. And when, at twenty-three, I read A Confederacy of Dunces, my mission crystallized. It wasn’t enough to be intelligent or insightful. No, I had to be a satirical novelist, an ambassador of caustic wit, a statesman of irony, and just self-deprecating enough that people wouldn’t hate me for it. I saw myself as a literary assassin, razor-sharp, unignorable, the kind of writer who forces the world to take notice.

    What the writing demon conveniently failed to mention—what it actively conspired to keep from me—is the vast and merciless chasm between the actual process of writing and the seductive fantasy of literary fame. To ignore this gulf is to court a special kind of stupidity, the kind that can waste an entire lifetime.

    Writing is a protracted act of self-torture, an endless loop of revision, self-doubt, and existential agony. J.P. Donleavy, author of The Ginger Man, had no idea what fresh hell awaited him as he wrestled his novel into something that met his own impossibly high standards. The process was not romantic; it was a war of attrition. Tedium, solitude, mental torment—these were his constant companions. But he and his book trudged forward, bloodied but breathing, as if the act of creation itself were some cursed form of survival.

    Meanwhile, I was high on a much glossier hallucination. I wasn’t going to be some embattled craftsman drowning in rewrites—I was going to be the genius, the confetti-drenched literary deity, basking in the ovation of an enraptured public. This was the demon’s cruel joke. The more reality smacked me in the face, the deeper I dug into the delusion. It wasn’t just self-deception; it was a pathology, a spiritual affliction.

    F. Scott Fitzgerald mapped this sickness in “Winter Dreams,” the tale of Dexter Green, a man who squanders his entire existence chasing Judy Jones, a capricious cipher onto which he projects all his longings. She isn’t a goddess—she’s an empty shell, a faithless mediocrity. No matter. His fantasy of perfection keeps him shackled to his own vanity, blind to the fact that life is passing him by.

    Dexter Green is a sucker. He doesn’t know how to live—only how to worship an illusion. He believes in moments frozen in time, in pristine, untouchable ideals, instead of the mess and movement of real life. And that, of course, is the problem. As therapist Phil Stutz puts it in Lessons for Living, “Our culture makes the destructive suggestion that we can perfect life and then get it to stand still… but real life is a process.” The ideal world is a snapshot—a slick, frozen fantasy that never existed. But still, these images are intoxicating. There’s no mess in them. And that’s precisely why they’re a trap.

    I cannot overstate the self-imposed destruction, loneliness, and sheer dumb misery that comes from being seduced by these moments frozen in time. To underscore my point, let’s rewind to 1982—a memory buried so deep in my psyche it took writing a book about the dangers of writing a book to dig it up.

    Back then, I was in college, drowning in an evening statistics course taught by a professor who looked like he’d been yanked straight from the pages of Dickens. His wild white hair defied gravity, his darting blue eyes seemed permanently lost in a private existential crisis, and his nose—aggressively red—suggested a longstanding love affair with whiskey. His aura? Pure, unfiltered eau de liquor. But he was kind, in the way that only deeply tragic people can be.

    The class itself was a slow-motion car crash. By week four—when the sadistic monster known as “standard deviation” reared its head—half of us were openly contemplating dropping out. Among my classmates was an elderly African American couple, dressed for church every single day, like they had wandered into the wrong building but decided to stay out of sheer politeness. The husband, Clarence, announced on day one that this was his seventh attempt at passing statistics. His wife, Dorothy, wasn’t even enrolled—she was there as his Bible-toting, knitting, long-suffering support system.

    Clarence’s approach to learning was… improvisational. While the rest of us shrank into our seats, he would leap up mid-lecture, cane clattering to the ground, and hobble to the chalkboard. Pointing an accusatory finger, he’d declare, “That’s not the answer I got! Let me show you!” Then he’d scrawl his “solution”—a series of indecipherable symbols that looked more like an alien distress signal than math.

    The professor, possibly fortified by whatever he had stashed in his desk, took these interruptions with monk-like patience. Dorothy, meanwhile, would bow her head and whisper prayers to “sweet Jesus,” presumably asking Him to either deliver her husband from his statistical afflictions or at least save her from public humiliation. The rest of us stifled laughter behind our hands. I sat there, torn between secondhand embarrassment and the creeping realization that this was pure comedy gold, something straight out of Saturday Night Live.

    After class, I’d drive home, pop in a cassette of The Psychedelic Furs or Echo and the Bunnymen, and drown in existential dread. I’d replay the scene over and over: Clarence’s quixotic battle with numbers, Dorothy’s quiet suffering. And then, like clockwork, I’d start crying. Not because I was flunking statistics or because my social life was a wasteland, but because that couple had shown me something profound: the power of love.

    Not the saccharine kind from movies, but the kind that trudges alongside you through seven failed attempts at statistics. The kind that withstands public embarrassment, dashed hopes, and sheer futility. The kind that endures.

    And here I was, wasting my life chasing a mirage. I was too caught up in my grand illusion of literary immortality. In my fevered fantasy, writing wasn’t grueling labor—it was divine alchemy. I would conjure brilliance with effortless flair, radiate tortured genius with an insouciant smirk. The world would see. The world would know. I would be whole. Complete. Immortal.

    But, of course, none of that happened.

    Decades passed. The literary world remained profoundly unaffected by my absence. The holy grail I had obsessed over wasn’t stolen—it simply… never materialized. And so, left standing in the wreckage of my own delusion, I did the only logical thing: I started writing a book about how foolish it is to write a book.

    And in that act of failure, I dug deep. In this memoir, which I am forbidden to write according to the terms of my sobriety, I excavated my past, peeling back layers of delusion, tracing the origins of this writing demon, this unquenchable hunger to be heard, to be distinct, to matter.

    Now, with some clarity (if not closure), a bigger question looms: What threatens me now?

    My war isn’t just with obscurity. It’s with a world surrendering to algorithms, generative AI, and the hollow dopamine drip of social media engagement. As a college writing professor who lives in the shadow of Manuscriptus Rex, I see my own relevance dangling by a thread, held hostage by an era where a bot can churn out a passable essay in seconds, where language itself is becoming disposable.

    So here we are. If I’m to survive, if my voice is to matter in this algorithmic wasteland, I must confront the existential question:

    How do you assert your presence in a world that is actively erasing the need for presence at all?

  • College Essay Prompt for Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You

    College Essay Prompt for Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You

    In So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport argues that the “craftsman mindset”—a focus on deliberate skill-building and becoming excellent at what you do—is a better path to career fulfillment than following one’s passion. He contends that “passion is rare, passion is dangerous, and passion is overrated.” In his view, obsessing over finding your “true calling” can lead to dissatisfaction, impulsivity, and a lack of resilience when things get hard. Instead, he believes that meaningful, satisfying work emerges from developing rare and valuable skills over time, which in turn gives people autonomy, impact, and a sense of mastery.

    However, some of the sharpest critiques of Newport’s thesis have come from students who see flaws in his binary framing of passion and craftsmanship. They argue:

    1. Not all passion is immature or fleeting. Passion, when grounded in lived experience and self-knowledge, can serve as a powerful motivator—especially when it is shaped by identity, values, and purpose.
    2. Without passion, work risks becoming soulless. A purely utilitarian focus on skill and market value can produce high-functioning but emotionally empty careers, where people feel like cogs in a machine rather than fulfilled human beings.
    3. The craftsman mindset doesn’t guarantee fulfillment. There’s no promise that honing a skill will magically lead to loving the work. Some people get really good at something and still hate doing it.
    4. Newport may be promoting a productivity ideology. His message can be interpreted as a form of secular Protestant work ethic: just grind hard, monetize your skill, and stop complaining. Some students have noted that this implicitly prioritizes economic value over personal meaning.

    With these critiques in mind, write a 1,700-word argumentative essay in which you respond to the following question:

    To what extent is Cal Newport’s “craftsman mindset” a better path to meaningful work than pursuing passion?

    In your essay, be sure to:

    • Summarize Newport’s central argument about the craftsman mindset and how it contrasts with the passion mindset.
    • Critically engage with the counterpoints listed above, especially those concerning the role of passion, emotional fulfillment, and the potential risks of overcommitting to skill development without joy.
    • Use examples from personal experience, observation, or research to illustrate your claims. You might consider real-world figures, your own aspirations, or trends in education and work culture.
    • Address the underlying values and assumptions behind both perspectives. What does Newport value most in his vision of meaningful work? What do his critics value? Where do these value systems clash?
    • Argue your position: Do you agree more with Newport or his critics? Or do you see a third way that reconciles the craftsman and passion mindsets?

    Your essay should aim to do more than take a side. It should dig into the philosophical and practical tensions between passion, discipline, skill, fulfillment, and economic survival. It should explore what we mean by “meaningful work” and who gets to define that meaning.

    Remember: this is not just a debate about careers. It’s a debate about how we live.

  • 3 College Essay Prompts for a Comparison of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X

    3 College Essay Prompts for a Comparison of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X

    Here are three essay prompts tailored for a 1,700-word comparative analysis of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X as literary heroes whose transformation through language empowered them to resist “The Sunken Place” and lead others toward justice:

    1.
     Prompt Title: Rewriting the Self: Douglass and Malcolm X as Architects of Liberation
     Prompt:
     Both Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X underwent radical personal transformations through their acquisition and use of language. In a well-developed essay, compare how Douglass in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X in The Autobiography of Malcolm X use reading, writing, and oratory as tools to escape what might be called “The Sunken Place”—a psychological and social condition of internalized oppression and learned helplessness. How does language serve as a weapon of self-reinvention and, ultimately, as a vehicle for leading others toward liberation?

    2.
     Prompt Title: From Silence to Speech: The Heroic Voice in Douglass and Malcolm X
     Prompt:
     In both Douglass’s and Malcolm X’s narratives, the journey from silence to speech marks the beginning of their heroism. Analyze how each man’s relationship to language—books, writing, and especially public speech—transforms them from passive subjects of oppression into active agents of change. How do their stories function as “literary transformations,” and how do they use their voices not just to escape the Sunken Place but to pull others out as well?

    3.
     Prompt Title: The Language of Resistance: Literary Heroism in Douglass and Malcolm X
     Prompt:
     Consider Douglass and Malcolm X as literary heroes whose weapon is not brute force but rhetorical and intellectual power. Both men begin in different forms of social invisibility and voicelessness, and both rise through literacy and speech to become revolutionary figures. In a comparative essay, explore how their mastery of language allowed them to diagnose the despair of systemic racism and to create a compelling counter-narrative of dignity, resistance, and hope.