Cinemorphosis

Category: Literary Dispatches

  • Joan Didion Was Correct: Writing Is an Aggressive Act

    Joan Didion Was Correct: Writing Is an Aggressive Act

    In my quest to diagnose the writing demon that refuses to release me from its grip, I turned to Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Authors on How and Why They Do What They Do, edited by Meredith Maran. In her introduction, Maran paints a bleak portrait of the literary life: writers waking before dawn, shackling themselves to their craft with grim determination, all while the odds of success hover somewhere between laughable and nonexistent.

    She lays out the statistics like a funeral director preparing the bereaved: out of a million manuscripts, only 1% will find a home. And if that doesn’t crush your soul, she follows up with another gut punch: only 30% of published books turn a profit. Clearly, materialism isn’t the primary motivator here. Perhaps masochism plays a role—some deep-seated desire for rejection that outstrips the mere thrill of self-rejection. Or maybe it’s just pathology, an exorcism waiting to happen.

    For those unwilling to embrace despair, Maran brings in George Orwell’s “four great motives for writing”: egotism, the pleasures of good prose, the need for historical clarity, and the urge to make a political argument. Sensible enough. No surprises.

    Where things get interesting is Joan Didion’s take. Didion, never one for sentimentality, strips the writer’s motives bare: “In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even hostile act.”

    Reading that, my eyes lit up with recognition. Didion had just sketched Manuscriptus Rex in perfect detail—the secret bully, the compulsive brain-hijacker who isn’t content to write in solitude but needs to occupy the minds of others, to install his worldview in their most private spaces.

    Terry Tempest Williams, on the other hand, writes to confront her ghosts, a sentiment that deeply appeals to me. The idea of the writer as a haunted creature, forever pursued by stories that demand exorcism, feels not only true but inescapable.

    But here’s the kicker—Maran makes it clear that the twenty writers in her book aren’t failures like me. They’re not Manuscriptus Rexes, howling into the void. No, they are the anointed ones, welcomed by publishers with open arms, bathed in the golden light of editorial gratitude.

    And yet, they didn’t land on Mount Olympus by accident. They fought. They clawed their way up, word by painful word, which means they have something to teach—not just to their fans but to me, a self-aware Manuscriptus Rex still trying to understand what, exactly, makes him tick.

    There is no shortage of delicious tidbits in Why We Write. Isabel Allende talks about the necessity of writing like a growing tumor that has to be dealt with or will simply grow out of control. She adds that even if she begins with a germ of an idea, the book has a life of its own. It grows from her unconscious obsessions and preoccupations, so that in the beginning she has not yet discovered what story she is going to tell. Also, she is a writer of ritual and routine. Every January seventh is the day before she starts writing a new book. She gathers all her materials in her “little pool house,” which she uses as her office. It is her sacred space to work, just “seventeen steps” from her home. 

    The idea of having two separate spaces—one for writing, one for everything else—fascinates me. It reminds me of something Martin Amis once told Charlie Rose: he needed to be a writer because toggling between the world of the novel and the earthly world created a kind of necessary duality, a parallel existence where imagination could thrive. For someone wired for storytelling, living between those two realities wasn’t just a luxury—it was a survival mechanism.

    At home, Isabel Allende straddles two universes, one sacred, the other profane. And it calls to mind the lesson my college fiction professor, N.V.M. Gonzalez, drilled into us: a fiction writer must know the difference between sacred and profane time.

    A great writer conducts these two temporal forces like an orchestra. Sacred time—mythic, timeless, symbolic—stretches beyond the clock, charging pivotal moments with fate, destiny, and the weight of history. It’s the crossroads where a single decision echoes through eternity. Profane time, by contrast, is the ticking metronome of daily existence—the coffee that goes cold, the unpaid bills, the search for a parking spot.

    A great novel moves between the two—one moment steeped in cosmic significance, the next trapped in the drudgery of real life. A character might wrestle with divine purpose—but that won’t stop their Wi-Fi from cutting out mid-revelation.

    Allende enters her writing enclave in a state of terror and exhilaration, grappling with ideas—some brilliant, some best left in the trash bin—while navigating stress, disappointment, and suspense. Her process feels high-stakes, and really, what is life without high stakes? A slow, numbing descent into low expectations, inertia, and existential boredom—a fate worse than failure.

    Maybe writing addiction is just the relentless drive to keep the stakes high. Without it, life shrinks into a provisional existence, where survival boils down to the next meal, the next fleeting pleasure, the next song that momentarily sends a tingle up your spine—a desperate Morse code from the universe to confirm you’re still alive.

    The writers in this book all share the same unshakable compulsion to write. For them, writing isn’t just a craft; it’s therapy, oxygen, a way to make sense of chaos. They write because they can’t not write—because failure to do so would send them spiraling into an existential crisis too dark to contemplate. Writing gives them self-worth, wards off insanity, and serves as the only acceptable coping mechanism for their undying curiosities. It isn’t a choice—it’s a chronic condition.

    These successful authors write relentlessly, enduring the agony of writer’s block, self-loathing, and the horror of their own bad prose, all while clawing their way toward something better. And while I share their compulsions, I lack their stamina and focus. Reading about Isabel Allende’s fourteen-hour writing binges was my moment of clarity: I am not a literary gladiator. These novelists can paint vast landscapes of story without crapping out halfway. I, on the other hand, am a wind-sprinter—a lunatic exploding off the starting block, only to collapse in a gasping heap a hundred yards later, curl into the fetal position, and slip into a creative coma.

    And this, I suspect, is the great torment of Manuscriptus Rex—an insatiable hunger to write the big book, clashing violently with a temperament built for sprints, not marathons. This misalignment fuels much of my artistic misery, my chronic dissatisfaction, and my ever-expanding graveyard of unfinished masterpieces.

    Still, whatever envy and despair I felt reading about these elite warriors of the written word, this book offered a cure—I will never again attempt a novel unless divine intervention forces my hand. I’ve seen too many of my failed attempts, the work of a man pretending to be a novelist rather than one willing to endure the necessary rigor. But I do have another calling: identifying unhinged, demonic states in others.

    Like a literary taxidermist, I want to capture these wild, self-destructive compulsions, mount them for display, and present them with maximum drama—not for amusement, but as cautionary tales. This is my work, my rehabilitation, the writing I was meant to do. And unlike novel-writing, it actually feels like a necessity, not a delusion.

  • Interrogating the Motivations to Write

    Interrogating the Motivations to Write

    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.

  • Revisiting Alan Judd’s The Devil’s Own Work

    Revisiting Alan Judd’s The Devil’s Own Work

    As a recovering member of Write-a-holics Anonymous, I am contractually obligated—by my own neuroses—to scrutinize my bad habits and the deep-seated delusions that keep them alive. If you’re unfamiliar with my affliction, allow me to introduce myself: I am Manuscriptus Rex, an evolutionary dead-end of the literary world, a creature that compulsively transforms mundane existence into unsolicited book proposals. Where others see a casual conversation, I see Chapter One. Where others experience a fleeting moment of anxiety, I draft a preface. Writing isn’t just a passion; it’s my go-to coping mechanism, my panic button, my self-inflicted curse. While normal people unwind with a drink, I relax by plotting out a three-act structure. Some people journal. I accidentally draft trilogies.

    There’s ongoing debate over whether people like me willingly morph into Manuscriptus Rex—the scowling failed writer pacing his lawn and muttering about “kids these days”—or if the transformation is as unavoidable as hair loss and rising cholesterol. Maybe it’s some grim milestone on the aging checklist, or maybe it sneaks up, the natural side effect of realizing your cultural currency has expired while the youth livestream their way into the future. I’ll leave that existential puzzle for the philosophers to untangle.

    Desperate for rehabilitation, I revisited Alan Judd’s The Devil’s Own Work, a novella that reads like a cautionary tale for every starry-eyed writer who thinks talent alone will crack open the literary Olympus. The story follows Edward, a smug, silver-spooned upstart who barters his soul for literary greatness, only to discover that selling out isn’t nearly as effective as selling your soul. Judd’s cynicism is deliciously savage, peeling back the genteel façade of the literary world to expose it for what it truly is—a brutal, Darwinian circus where desperate souls claw their way up the ladder of editors, columnists, and curators, schmoozing with all the grace of a used car salesman at an estate auction.

    These hopefuls cling to the delusion that if they just network hard enough, flatter the right people, and craft the perfect blend of self-importance and faux humility, they’ll eventually ascend to greatness. But Judd knows better. The truth is, most of them will age out of relevance, their grand ambitions reduced to a handful of bitter op-eds, a smattering of unpaid guest lectures, and an attic full of unpublished manuscripts that smell faintly of despair. In the end, The Devil’s Own Work isn’t just a novella—it’s a scalpel, slicing through the bloated corpse of literary ambition to reveal the grotesque machinery inside.

    Edward is not your typical literary striver. While others claw and hustle their way up the greasy pole of literary success, he lounges at the base of it, certain that greatness will fall into his lap simply because he exists. He radiates a kind of effortless entitlement, convinced that the universe has preordained his ascent to literary immortality. Unlike the desperate social climbers around him, who at least put in the work, Edward is a narcissist of the purest strain—so enamored with his own exceptionalism that he sees ambition as beneath him.

    But Edward’s arrogance isn’t just about believing he’s destined for greatness—it’s about redefining what that greatness should look like. He is determined to strip his writing of any moral compass, crafting fiction that exists in a vacuum of pure, detached aestheticism. No lessons, no redemptions, no conscience. Just words untethered from anything resembling a soul.

    Meanwhile, the legendary O.M. Tyrrel, the region’s most revered novelist, is preparing to publish his final work before slipping into retirement. His magnum opus? A variation on the Faustian myth—a fitting coincidence, given the dark turn Edward’s life is about to take. In an act of staggering hubris, the insufferable upstart Edward pens a blistering review of Tyrrel’s novel, a hit job so scathing it should have burned any bridge between them. But instead of outrage, Tyrrel extends an invitation—dinner at his lavish villa in the south of France. There, over fine wine and literary banter, Tyrrel hands Edward a manuscript of ominous origin.

    What follows is a shortcut to literary fame that quickly warps into a descent into madness. Edward’s name skyrockets into the literary stratosphere, but his triumph is laced with terror. First, a persistent scratching sound haunts him whenever he writes—like something clawing its way out of the pages. Then, a malignant presence begins to stalk him, whispering the truth he’s been trying to drown in champagne and self-congratulation: he is a fraud. He has built his career on stolen words, and now those words have turned against him.

    By the time he realizes his fame is nothing but a gilded curse, it’s too late. Whatever twisted deal he unknowingly made, it has hollowed him out, leaving behind a man unrecognizable even to himself. His success is a mockery, his genius a sham, and his fate—a lifetime of torment, forever pursued by the spectral condemnation of the very thing he sought: greatness.

    As I sifted through the grim moral reckonings of The Devil’s Own Work, trying to extract some life lesson from Edward’s Faustian bargain, my inner writing demon—never one to miss an opportunity to heckle—chimed in.

    “Nice try, pal,” it sneered. “But this book won’t cure you. First off, you’re not Edward. He’s a smug layabout with a superiority complex. You, on the other hand, actually believe in morality tales. Second, Edward expects success to land in his lap like a butler delivering his morning tea. You, meanwhile, obsess over your subjects like a madman, descend into your characters’ fever dreams, and suffer through their torments just to wring out a halfway decent paragraph. Admit it—you’re a real novelist.”

    What a load of self-aggrandizing nonsense. Even if all that were true, there are plenty of people who observe the human condition with a keener eye than mine, and they don’t write novels. They work construction. They write poetry, fables, children’s books. They tell stories in bars, on factory floors, in courtrooms. Insight alone doesn’t make one a novelist.

    But damn that writing demon—it had a point. I wasn’t Edward. The novella didn’t apply to me. And if The Devil’s Own Work didn’t condemn me to a fate of fraudulent literary fame, then maybe—just maybe—I wasn’t doomed to failure either.

    Clearly, the writing demon still lives inside of me. My rehabilitation must continue. 

  • Failure is the default setting of the writer

    Failure is the default setting of the writer

    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.

  • Teaching History Without Erasure: Frederick Douglass, Germany’s Reckoning, and the Power of Truth

    Teaching History Without Erasure: Frederick Douglass, Germany’s Reckoning, and the Power of Truth

    This is my second essay prompt in my freshman composition class:

    Teaching History Without Erasure: Frederick Douglass, Germany’s Reckoning, and the Power of Truth

    In recent years, fierce debates have erupted over how slavery, Jim Crow laws, and racial injustice should be taught in American classrooms. Some critics argue that these lessons have become excessively politicized, accusing educators of pushing a divisive narrative that portrays America as fundamentally irredeemable. They claim that such an approach fosters victimhood, undermines critical thinking, and turns education into a vehicle for ideological indoctrination.

    Others push back, arguing that this resistance is itself a form of historical distortion—an attempt to silence African-American voices and obscure painful but essential truths. They assert that teaching racial injustice is not about politics but about moral, psychological, and historical reckoning. Frederick Douglass’ writings offer a powerful counterpoint, illustrating how truth-telling about oppression is not an act of condemnation but one of empowerment. Much like Jordan Peele’s The Sunken Place concept, Douglass’ life reveals how acknowledging injustice can lead to personal agency, resistance, and the pursuit of justice. Similarly, Germany’s post-Holocaust reckoning provides a framework for confronting historical atrocities without fostering helplessness or national self-loathing.

    For this 1,700-word argumentative essay (MLA format required), analyze how Frederick Douglass’ personal fight against slavery and Germany’s effort to memorialize the Holocaust offer crucial lessons on addressing historical injustice. Drawing on Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave and Clint Smith’s essay “Monuments to the Unthinkable,” explore how bearing witness to historical truths can foster accountability, self-agency, and resilience. Consider how both examples highlight the importance of acknowledging past wrongs while also promoting national and individual growth.

    Essay Requirements:

    • Length: 1,700 words
    • Format: MLA (Modern Language Association)
    • Sources: Minimum of 4, cited in MLA format
    • Required Texts:
      • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (available online as a PDF)
      • Clint Smith’s “Monuments to the Unthinkable”
      • PBS NewsHour YouTube video “Why Americans Are So Divided Over Teaching Critical Race Theory”
      • David Pilgrim’s YouTube video “The Jim Crow Museum”
      • Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” (Optional for thematic analysis)

    Key Focus Areas for Analysis:

    • How Douglass’ narrative challenges oppression and promotes self-agency
    • How Germany’s post-Holocaust reforms serve as a model for confronting historical injustice
    • The moral responsibility of societies to acknowledge past atrocities and ensure they are not repeated
    • How historical awareness empowers future generations to break cycles of injustice
    • Strategies for teaching history in a way that fosters accountability, growth, and resilience—without promoting victimhood or division

    This essay invites you to step beyond the surface of modern political debates and examine how history, when taught truthfully, can serve as a tool for both personal and societal transformation. How should we reckon with our past, and what can we learn from those who have done it well?

  • In the 1970s, Books Were Sacred Texts

    In the 1970s, Books Were Sacred Texts

    In the 1970s—when books weren’t just books; they were sacred texts, maps to enlightenment, portals to a better world. Back then, the right book could change everything. And no place embodied this belief more than the Co-Op grocery store in the San Francisco Bay Area, a socialist utopia disguised as a supermarket.

    Co-Op wasn’t just a store—it was a temple of countercultural righteousness, a fluorescent-lit commune where food was political, capitalism was the enemy, and books were the gospel of enlightenment and revolution. The employees, mostly bearded men in survivalist gear and women in flowing skirts, looked like they had just emerged from a transcendental meditation retreat in Big Sur. The store carried everything necessary for the well-intentioned ascetic: wheat germ, carob honey ice cream, tofu, Japanese yams, granola by the truckload. In one corner, you could buy an alfalfa sprout home-growing kit; in another, you could pick up a well-worn copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book section—small, but potent—was a who’s who of 70s countercultural essentials: The Secret Life of Plants, Chariots of the Gods, The Peter Principle, and the vegetarian bible of all vegetarian bibles, Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet.

    Shopping at Co-Op was an act of ideological purification. You weren’t just filling your pantry—you were waging war against The Man. Your grocery list was a manifesto. Brown rice instead of white? A stance against industrial food tyranny. Organic honey? A protest against corporate sugar slavery. Granola? The fuel of the revolution.

    But here’s the problem with turning your diet into a moral crusade—it comes with unintended consequences. Specifically, Granola Belly.

    The self-styled revolutionaries of the Co-Op era, those brave warriors against the forces of corporate food oppression, were inadvertently overeating their way to oblivion. Granola, wheat germ, and honey—pure, untainted by corporate greed—were caloric landmines. Yet they shoveled it down in righteous indignation, their burgeoning bellies a testament to their dietary zealotry. They waddled through the aisles, draped in North Face survival gear, looking ready to disappear into the Alaskan wilderness at any moment—if only they weren’t weighed down by their own moral superiority.

    Granola enthusiasts of the 70s were, in essence, a contradiction wrapped in a paradox and coated in raw honey. They raged against consumerism, yet consumed with a ferocity that would make a glutton blush. They preached self-discipline while mainlining carbohydrate ecstasy. They railed against corporate food tyranny, but the only thing expanding faster than their political righteousness was their waistlines.

    But Co-Op wasn’t just about the food—it was about the books. If the aisles were the body of the revolution, the books were its soul. They were blueprints for enlightenment, roadmaps to utopia. Talk to plants, replace animal protein with soy, meditate your way to cosmic awareness, learn the wisdom of the ancient aliens—everything you needed to build a new world was right there, tucked between the sacks of lentils and jars of miso paste.

    Which brings me back to my writing demon.

    Just as the Co-Op faithful believed books could transform civilization, I have spent my life believing the same about my own writing. The demon isn’t just some compulsive need to write—it’s the insatiable hunger for literary immortality, the delusion that one book—one perfectly crafted book—could define me, complete me, redeem me.

    It’s the same old obsession, wrapped in different packaging. My granola bowl is now a manuscript, my utopian blueprint now a satirical screed. I am still that wide-eyed Co-Op kid, convinced that books can reshape the world. But instead of reading the gospel, I am trying—foolishly, obsessively—to write it.

  • The Aspiring Writer Strives to Overcome His Inferiority Complex

    The Aspiring Writer Strives to Overcome His Inferiority Complex

    The aspiring writer, Manuscriptus Rex, writes not out of pure inspiration but from the unholy fusion of a chip on his shoulder and a raging inferiority complex. His desperation for a cure has somehow led him to the worst possible conclusion: that literary dominance is the only path to salvation. Anything short of conquering the literary world? Utter failure.

    Why such extremes? Because Manuscriptus Rex is an eternal adolescent, emotionally stunted and incapable of nuance. Life is a brutal, binary equation—winners or losers, triumph or oblivion. There is no middle ground. And for those with just enough talent to know they’ll never be the best? The humiliation is unbearable. They sink into a spiral of self-loathing so profound, they start questioning why they were born in the first place.

    This despair is captured well in the 1984 movie Amadeus, in which Salieri, the patron saint of mediocrity, spends his life gnashing his teeth over the fact that, for all his ambition, he’ll always be the guy in the cheap seats while Mozart, the true genius, takes center stage. Some might be tempted to draw the same parallel between Paul and Jesus, as if Paul were some whiny Salieri, shaking his fist at the heavens over his lack of messianic charisma. Dead wrong. Paul didn’t sulk in anyone’s shadow. He sharpened his writing tools, rearranged the spotlight, and made damn sure it was aimed squarely at himself.

    How successful was Paul at making his writing stick? Let’s put it this way—his entire written output amounts to about eighty pages. Eighty pages. That’s not even the length of a middling beach read you’d abandon in an airport terminal. And yet, those pages have been scrutinized, weaponized, and dissected with more fervor than any artistic or literary masterpiece in human history.

    I sit here, surveying the wreckage of five decades of my own writing, knowing full well that it will likely fade into the void, while Paul’s scant eighty pages have dictated the course of Western thought, politics, and religion for two thousand years. The word “influence” doesn’t even begin to cover it. This is literary world domination.

    And was this tidal wave of influence accidental? Hardly. Paul wasn’t just writing to save souls—he was writing for his own immortality.

    Pauline scholars love to point out that Paul wasn’t exactly thrilled with what the original apostles were peddling. Their Jesus still had training wheels—tied to Torah, saddled with Jewish law, bogged down by the pesky weight of tradition. Paul, on the other hand, had a better idea. His Jesus was purer, punchier, and more potent—a spiritual superfood untainted by Torah preservatives. And Paul wasn’t shy about it. He called it “my gospel”—not once, but over and over again, like a divine trademark. Forget the Jewish-flavored Jesus movement—Paul’s was gluten-free, carb-free, and straight to the Gentile bloodstream.

    This wasn’t just a theological shift—it was a hostile takeover. Paul didn’t seem particularly interested in Jesus’ actual words. Sermons? Parables? “Love thy neighbor”? Small-time. Paul’s focus was on his own visions, his personal revelations, the ones that conveniently made himself the authority on Jesus. While Peter and James clung to their quaint Jewish traditions, Paul rebranded Christianity in his own image, rolling out a one-man revolution that sidelined the original apostles like outdated board members in a corporate coup.

    And rabbi scholar Hyam Maccoby—never one to understate a theological conspiracy—takes it even further. According to The Mythmaker, Paul didn’t just step out from Jesus’ shadow—he steamrolled over it and rebranded Christianity as a Paul Production, with himself as lead architect of one of history’s largest religious empires. Salieri could only dream of that level of self-promotion.

    But Paul didn’t just change the messaging—he altered the entire emotional foundation of Christianity. Maccoby doesn’t just accuse Paul of hijacking Christianity—he accuses him of rewriting the entire Old Testament like a hack screenwriter with a savior complex. The Jewish tradition of free will, strength, and human agency is replaced with Paul’s bleak vision of humanity—where people are helpless worms, groveling in the dirt, utterly incapable of doing anything good without divine intervention.

    Fast-forward two millennia, and we’re still drowning in the wreckage of Paul’s inferiority complex—scrolling ourselves into oblivion, slaves to algorithms, locked in a spiritual malaise that might as well have been engineered by Paul himself. Maccoby paints Paul not as a mystical visionary, but as a man crippled by his own self-loathing, a former Pharisee who couldn’t hack it in Jewish law, so he torched the whole thing and built his own damn religion. And it worked.

    Paul’s biggest marketing coup was turning Jesus into something unrecognizable. Gone was the Torah-loving Jewish teacher—in his place, a Hellenized God-man with cosmic grandeur. But Paul didn’t work alone. He had Luke, his personal spin doctor, crafting The Acts of the Apostles—a biblical infomercial designed to make Paul look like a tireless hero, smoothing out his awkward edges, burying any embarrassing missteps, and giving the real apostles about as much airtime as unpaid extras in Paul’s vanity project. The result? A Christianity that barely resembled anything Jesus actually taught, but one tailor-made for mass adoption.

    It’s a corporate rebrand so slick that Paul might as well be the Steve Jobs of Western religion.

    Paul didn’t just invent a religion—he invented religious dominance. His theology was designed for maximum influence, structured like a brilliantly engineered algorithm—one that self-replicates, adapts, and burrows into the psyche like a spiritual virus. You don’t just believe in Paul’s Christianity; you’re owned by it.

    And this is where the connection to my own writing demon becomes uncomfortably clear.

    Paul did what I’ve always wanted to do—he wrote something so potent, so inescapable, so monolithic, that it hijacked human consciousness for centuries. His letters didn’t just survive—they became the foundation for an entire civilization. And what is that if not the ultimate literary ambition?

    The writing demon inside me has always whispered the same temptation—that if I just write the right book, if I craft my message well enough, if I design the perfect narrative, I can transcend obscurity, reshape reality, and carve my name into history.

    Paul did it. He wrote himself into religious permanence, his eighty pages outlasting every empire, every cultural movement, every literary masterpiece.

    And maybe that’s why I can’t stop thinking about him.

    Because deep down, I know: Paul is the ghostwriter of my own ambition.

  • Writing Is World-Building

    Writing Is World-Building

    The writer who seeks literary dominance can be called Manuscriptus Rex. He is a beast acutely aware of his own brokenness, a self-awareness that drags him into the depths of morbidity and despair. But mere recognition of his anguish isn’t enough—he must transcend it. Not through quiet introspection or self-acceptance, but through literary dominance. Writing isn’t just therapy; it’s conquest. His words are not gentle offerings but acts of aggression against the world, though he convinces himself otherwise. He’s not a tyrant—he’s a savior. He doesn’t crave attention—he has something urgent to say, something the world must hear.

    One of the most exalted members of the Manuscriptus Rex species? The Apostle Paul. His life reads like a high-stakes thriller—a battle-worn intellectual waging ideological war through the written word. If Hollywood ever needed a poster child for a writer with a messianic mission, Paul would be it. Ink-stained fingers, unshakable conviction, and a belief that his words would outlast empires—because, of course, they did.

    Thinking of Paul as a character in a movie reminds me of a similarly absurd but far less consequential scene from my own past: the time my high school bodybuilding buddy, Martino, and I were ensnared by the oldest bait-and-switch in history—free food and salvation. We had been lured to a Wednesday night church youth group by the promise of unlimited lasagna and Kool-Aid, a trap set by the twin seductions of carbs and sugar. The youth pastor, a bearded, bespectacled man with the unshakable enthusiasm of someone who truly believed he could sell eternal life like a used car, paced the room as he spun his gospel pitch. He wanted to know if we were ready to accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, as though an extra serving of garlic bread might tip us into theological certainty.

    Martino, a squat, blocky fellow with a neck so thick it could’ve moonlighted as a battering ram, sat politely through the sermon, nodding with the blank expression of a man deep in a carb coma. His eyebrows, heavy and brooding, looked as if they were preparing to stage a labor strike right there on his face. By the time we left, his stomach was full, but his soul remained stubbornly unmoved. Driving home, he grunted through a yawn, “Nice lasagna, but I don’t think I found Jesus in there.”

    Paul would’ve had a field day with Martino, hammering him with letters, debates, and fiery rebukes until he saw the light—or at least surrendered out of sheer exhaustion.

    “Eternal paradise? Eternal hell? If you want to win me over, show me the movie.” Without a flicker of humor, he added, “Jacques Cousteau and his film crew need to do a deep dive into heaven and hell and report back. Then maybe the pastor will have something worth talking about.”

    I couldn’t help but think of Jacques Cousteau and his team of underwater explorers filming their way through the afterlife when I was reading French novelist Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom. In typical Carrère fashion, he takes the early church and flips it into a bizarre TV production, with Saint Paul as the leading man, flexing his theological muscles for the cameras, while Luke, ever the dutiful biographer and behind-the-scenes producer, works overtime to keep Paul in the best possible light. It’s like watching Keeping Up with the Apostles, with Luke spinning Paul’s antics while fending off rival apostles who think ditching the Torah is a little too avant-garde. You can almost picture Luke yelling “Cut!” every time Paul’s dramatic speeches veer a little too close to heresy, scrambling to keep the script on track as the whole Jesus movement teeters on the edge of a theological reality show gone wrong.

    Carrère kicks off his novel with a nod to a TV show he worked on about people who had the inconvenient habit of dying and then popping back into life in a small town. He muses,  “I stopped writing fiction long ago, but I can recognize a powerful fictional device when I see it. And this was by far the most powerful one I’ed been offered in my career as a screenwriter.” In a world that’s often nasty, brutish, and short (thanks, Hobbes), the idea of reuniting with our dearly departed is practically irresistible. The implication? Any religion that dangles this tantalizing offer in front of us is going to beat out the competition—especially those dull creeds that don’t have a resurrection hook.

    As Carrère (who writes as the narrator and a version of himself) dives into production for Les Revenants (The Returned), he lets slip to the show’s directors that he’s also knee-deep in another project—a book about the early days of Christianity, circa 50 A.D. in Corinth. Just like the TV show’s fascination with life after death, his book is centered on a ragtag hero, Paul, a weak and afflicted guy who has the audacity to proclaim the resurrection of a prophet. But Paul doesn’t stop there. He’s selling resurrection like it’s the next big thing, a kind of spiritual VIP access, where believers in this prophet get to share in the resurrection perks. And guess what? This faith spreads like wildfire, catching on faster than the latest TikTok trend, and brings with it a personal transformation that Carrère dubs a “mutation.”

    Soon, this belief system grows so big it becomes mainstream. While Greek mythology gets relegated to the kiddie pool of fairy tales, Paul’s gospel of resurrection, virgin birth, sacrifice, and atonement becomes the intellectual equivalent of filet mignon—served up and taken seriously by the world’s smartest, most educated minds, who swallow it whole. It’s no longer quaint mythology—it’s doctrine. And everyone’s buying in.

    But Carrère doesn’t treat this religion as some ironic punchline. Nope, he’s serious, bordering on obsessive. His novel isn’t a parody of early Christianity; it’s a deep dive into how these early religious pioneers, especially Paul, wrestled to bring their story to life. In Carrère’s view, this whole endeavor is a lot like producing a TV show—grappling with messy production details, contending with rival storylines, and trying to make the narrative stick. His novel becomes a meditation on storytelling itself, especially the stories that linger in our minds, take root, and possess us—even as our faith wobbles on shaky ground. It’s about the narratives that survive the centuries, not because they’re quaint, but because they hit us where it counts.

    By the time Carrère loses his faith and slides into agnosticism, he’s still obsessed with the steadfast faith of others. Religion, he realizes, isn’t going anywhere—it’s hardwired into our brains like some sort of default app we can’t delete. We’re suckers for stories that explain the human condition, and like William James says in The Varieties of Religious Experience, we’ve all got our internal wiring that divides the “healthy-minded soul” from the “sick-minded soul.” Shame, guilt, penance—it’s all built into our psyche. And in moments of catharsis, we somehow manage to feel connected to our Maker, like a spiritual Wi-Fi signal we can only tap into when we’re having an existential meltdown.

    I couldn’t read The Kingdom without recognizing my own affliction: the belief that writing a novel isn’t just storytelling—it’s world-building, doctrine-crafting, the construction of a system so compelling that it hijacks minds and rewires belief. Carrère brilliantly lays out the blueprint for how a book mutates into a religion, how a narrative, if potent enough, doesn’t just entertain—it converts, indoctrinates, and dominates. And that’s when it hit me: my writing demon wasn’t interested in just producing a book. It wanted a Bible, something so monumental it would command devotion, establish authority, and secure my literary immortality. It wasn’t enough to write—I had to found a faith, recruit disciples, and stake my claim in the intellectual marketplace of salvation. Whether it was Paul pitching resurrection or me hammering away at my so-called masterpiece, the impulse was the same: create something too big to ignore, too transformative to discard, and too undeniable to fade into obscurity. And just like Paul, I was willing to burn through years, health, and sanity for the cause.

  • Interrogating the impulse to achieve literary dominance

    Interrogating the impulse to achieve literary dominance

    Looking back at 5 decades of writing dozens of failed novels, I’m torn between admiring my audacity and filing a restraining order against my judgment. How, exactly, did I manage to pin so much hope on novels that, despite their half-decent opening chapters, quickly spiraled into the literary equivalent of a stalled elevator—going nowhere and deeply uncomfortable for everyone involved?

    In contrast, my short essays were clearly sharper, more potent—but I refused to let reality intrude on my mission. No, I was going to write the comic novel.

    This compulsion was never about art. It was about pain—the kind so deep that Jonathan Franzen famously coined Ache to describe the existential condition of adulthood: the rude awakening that we are not, in fact, the center of the universe and that our desires will always outrun our ability to satisfy them.

    Manuscriptus Rex feels this Ache acutely and has embarked on a fool’s errand to silence it with literary fame. But why this brand of glory? Why not build a real estate empire, become a movie heartthrob, or invent the perfect bed that guarantees twelve uninterrupted hours of blissful, coma-grade sleep? Because Manuscriptus Rex is too much of a narcissist for mere wealth, beauty, or utility. Writing a book—one that matters—offers something more intoxicating: the power to hijack people’s brains.

    And that’s what you really crave—not just admiration, but full cognitive occupation. You want your words burrowed into the minds of millions, your dream world dictating their thoughts. Your need for validation is so bottomless that only mass literary infiltration will mollify you. That this ambition is wildly improbable, driven by pathology, and guaranteed to bring more suffering than satisfaction? Irrelevant. The mission is all that matters. And the mission is literary dominance.

    My wife once observed that men, with their colossal egos, often wake up with sudden revelations, epiphanies so grand they feel compelled to start religions. She’s not wrong. The novelist, the polemicist—what are they really doing but trying to ignite a movement, disrupt the world, and bask in the glow of their own importance? Their gospel isn’t about some grand truth—it’s about them, standing center stage, ablaze with self-appointed brilliance.

    Religion is the ultimate expression of literary dominance. I think of the Apostle Paul himself, scribbling his epistles in a manic frenzy, waging rhetorical war in the bustling marketplace of spiritual ideas, demolishing rival orators, and confessing his own unhinged nature in Romans—his theological magnum opus, a mini-Bible inside the Bible. Only eighty pages in total. That was the sum of his obsessive writing, and yet his literary dominance is established. He’s been the talk of the town for over two thousand years. Whether they like him or not, people still want to hear what he has to say about the human condition. 

    This was the novelist’s role five decades ago, back when novelists were secular prophets, summoned to The Dick Cavett Show to pontificate on the issues of the day—because, once upon a time, their opinions mattered.

    And that’s what I loved about Cavett. Even as a ten-year-old, I grasped the show’s implicit assumption: the intellectual life was its own parallel universe, just as electrifying as Paul’s eschatological one—except with better punchlines.

    Perhaps Cavett planted the seeds of my literary delusion, setting the stage for a demon that would fully blossom into madness a decade later when I read A Confederacy of Dunces—then Portnoy’s Complaint and The Ginger Man. If I could write something as riotously funny as those masterpieces, I wouldn’t just be funny—I’d be brilliant, important, part of the conversation. My name would be etched into the pantheon of literary wit, my shattered self-esteem miraculously restored. I would find completion.

    And lest you think this was mere posturing, let me be clear: my aspirations weren’t some carefully curated cool pose. I was, without question, funny—not in the “guy who recycles late-night monologue jokes” way, but in the gimlet-eyed, take-no-prisoners way that slices through the world’s absurdities like a scalpel. I was an ally of Kafka, wielding my literary axe to shatter the frozen ocean of human folly. My quest was real, my voice authentic, my success inevitable.

    Except, of course, it wasn’t.

    I failed. Repeatedly. The novels kept coming, and to my credit, they got better—sharper, wittier, good enough to attract literary agents, which was dangerous because it fed the delusion. This wasn’t a phase. It became a lifelong affliction. In my twenties, thirties, forties, fifties—hell, even my sixties—the novels kept churning, like those chocolates on the conveyor belt in I Love Lucy, coming faster than I could process, devour, or even appreciate.

    The demon was still in business.

    And how good were these books as the result of all my literary effort? “Just okay.” Which, in an attention economy, is about as useful as a dial-up modem in the age of fiber optics. “Just okay” might sell 300 copies—a number so pitiful that the editor who championed your book could lose their job over it.

    But sure, let’s keep the dream alive.

    Having failed to write my grand, world-shaking book and having let A Confederacy of Dunces derail my life, I am left standing amid the wreckage of my literary ambitions, clutching at whatever scraps of wisdom I can salvage. Something must be redeemed, after all. And what better way to salvage a wreck than by turning it into yet another book? The Confessions of a Recovering Writing Addict.

    But of course, that’s just the demon running its mouth again. The same devious little imp that once whispered sweet nothings about my inevitable literary greatness now insists that my failure is my brand, my gimmick, my golden ticket to the book that will finally rock the world.

    And what is this seismic masterpiece, this literary game-changer? Oh, just a book about aspiring writers so starved for attention that they write not as artists, but as junkies, chasing the next fix of validation. A cautionary tale wrapped in a confession, packaged as a sales pitch—because irony, it seems, is the one thing I have mastered.

    Writing with an ego hellbent on domination, we writing junkies reveal an uncomfortable truth—we all have a little Paul in us. We insist we write out of sincerity, fueled by a pure, burning need to communicate something true. But let’s not kid ourselves. Deep down, what we really crave isn’t truth—it’s importance. Recognition. Veneration. And, above all, relevance.

    We aren’t just stringing words together; we’re mounting a last-ditch offensive against oblivion, hammering out prose as if sheer verbosity might hold off the reaper a little longer.

    In the end, we place our hope in something as fragile as a glue-and-paper book in the digital age, believing—despite all evidence to the contrary—that it will elevate us, transcend us, and make us immortal.

  • Where my literary delusions were born

    Where my literary delusions were born

    To understand the bloated sense of self-importance that fueled my literary delusions, we need to revisit my place of employment—a temple of pretension where my ego found fertile ground. In the early 1980s, I funded my college education by peddling fine wines and imported beers at Jackson’s Wine & Spirits in Berkeley, conveniently nestled just up the street from the Claremont Hotel on Ashby Avenue. It was the perfect setting for a young man to marinate in delusions of grandeur—surrounded by cork-sniffing sophisticates, armchair sommeliers, and the kind of clientele who believed a well-aged Bordeaux could double as a personality.

    My coworkers were the sort of intellectual show-offs who could reduce an Oxford don to a stammering fool. They held advanced degrees in everything from literature to linguistics, chemistry to musicology, and they wore their academic pedigrees like badges of honor, brandishing them in a booze emporium as if the walls were lined with first editions rather than bottles of Chianti. They’d read Flaubert in the original French and sneered at English translations with the kind of disdain usually reserved for bad table wine. To them, working for any corporation that might dare to track their time was an act of existential surrender. Instead, they peddled fine spirits with an elitism so thick you could bottle it, cork it, and slap a vintage label on it. Their motto? “Service with a smirk.” 

    I wanted to fit in, so I read voraciously, parroting these cultural heavyweights who could debate the nuances of two French Beaujolais for an entire shift while tossing out quotes from Kierkegaard or Camus. Soon enough, I was well on my way to becoming a full-blown snob, the kind who could turn a simple idea into a verbal labyrinth designed to impress rather than clarify. Slow hours found us planted by the registers dissecting the finer points of Nietzsche’s existential dread, Wagner’s bombastic compositions, and Kafka’s literary conundrums. I became intoxicated with my own intellect (mostly because I couldn’t afford the good wine) and used every fifty-dollar word in the book to convince myself I was superior to anyone with a steady paycheck. Working alongside this oddball crew was comfortable and, let’s face it, easy, but it lulled me into a delusion: I might not be wealthy or gainfully employed, but I was intellectually rich, or so I told myself.

    By my mid-twenties, I was perfectly content to be the Nerf football-throwing, Borges-quoting slacker clerk who waxed poetic about the existential themes of Alberto Moravia and the tragic pessimism of Miguel de Unamuno while restocking shelves with Chianti. 

    To further swell my already bloated ego, I spent my early twenties teaching college writing part-time, fancying myself some sort of literary prodigy destined for greatness. Whether I was regaling my students with pompous insights—laced with Nabokovian verbosity—or delivering the same drivel to wine store customers, I reveled in the delusion that I was the gravitational center of the universe. Every word I uttered, every pretentious quip, felt like a gift to the world—never mind that no one had asked for it.

    Thus mired in a fever swamp of self-regard, I began my holy quest, an epic pilgrimage of delusion. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, I churned out novels at a terrifying speed, convinced that sheer productivity equaled genius. Wow, I must be good at this! I thought, mistaking volume for talent, like a man believing that eating more hot dogs makes him a Michelin-star chef.

    The novels blur together now, a vast landfill of ambition outpacing execution, but three stand out for their sheer absurdity.

    In 1989, I wrote Herculodge, a dystopian satire in which being overweight or displaying cellulite was illegal. This premise, better suited for a five-minute SNL skit, somehow sprawled into a 60,000-word novella, proving that even bad ideas can be tediously stretched to novel length.

    In 1991, I produced Omnivore, the tragic tale of a man who could never find satisfaction eating his own food, forcing him to break into houses and devour leftovers from strangers’ refrigerators. Only through cat burglary could he achieve satiety—a premise that sounds brilliantly unhinged in a John Cheever short story but unbearable at novel length. Unfortunately, I chose the latter, cramming 10 percent story into 90 percent padding, like an overstuffed burrito of literary excess.

    In 1992 while teaching college in the California desert, I lived next to a man who was less a neighbor and more an anthropological oddity—a legal brief-reading, Kenny G-blasting exhibitionist who pranced around the apartment pool in custom-print Speedos while slowly tanning himself into a deep mahogany hue. He became the unwitting inspiration for The Man Who Stopped Dating, my novel about an uncouth playboy who receives a vengeful fruit basket from one of his scorned lovers. A single bite from a deliquescing mango leaves him cursed with a permanent stench, a condition suspiciously similar to fish odor syndrome (trimethylaminuria, for the medically inclined). His hero’s journey becomes a desperate quest to rid himself of the smell, find redemption, and maybe—just maybe—salvage his soul.

    Convinced I had spun pure gold, I went all in—I adapted the story into a screenplay and shelled out a cool two grand to have Hollywood script guru Linda Seger take a scalpel to it. Her verdict? Great premise. Catastrophic structure. Apparently, my masterpiece wasn’t so much a movie as a sprawling narrative train wreck, gasping for subplots, character depth, and the basic bones of a coherent story.

    But did that deter me? Of course not. In my fevered delusion, the mere act of consulting with Hollywood’s premier script doctor meant I was practically in—one fortuitous lunch meeting away from a bidding war over my genius. I could already hear studio execs brawling over my brilliance, assuming they could hold their breath long enough to endure a script about a man who smells like low tide.

    In reality, I wasn’t Hemingway. I wasn’t even a second-rate Elmore Leonard. I was Rupert Pupkin, the delusional failure from The King of Comedy, rehearsing for a fame that was never coming. The difference? At least he had the decency to keep his fantasies in his mother’s basement.