Cinemorphosis

Tag: book-review

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Zen and the Art of Overwriting

    Zen and the Art of Overwriting

    I’m fully aware of the irony—here I am, writing a book about why neither you nor I should write a book, all while suspecting that the very act of doing so is just another cruel trick played by the same deranged demon that has spent decades squandering my life. This demon doesn’t care about reason, practicality, or viable creative outlets. No, it thrives on delusion, whispering sweet nothings about literary immortality while leading me, yet again, down another fool’s errand disguised as a grand artistic mission.

    And sure, this book has a certain rigor, a dash of élan, even a seductive frisson that keeps me going—but haven’t I felt this before? Haven’t I mistaken obsession for genius, compulsion for destiny? As much as I’d like to believe this time is different, I can’t shake the creeping suspicion that I’m once again doing the demon’s bidding, marching in circles, convinced I’m breaking new ground.

    For all I know, the writing demon has plucked this topic—why you shouldn’t write a book—the literary equivalent of a half-eaten donut fished out of a dumpster, held it up like a divine relic, and declared, “Behold! The sacred sustenance for the book that will change the world!”

    I have to wonder why this demon remains so incalcitrant, why it refuses to release its grip on my psyche. And I suspect it was baked in during my formative years—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.

  • Applause Fatigue and Other Addictions

    Applause Fatigue and Other Addictions

    Once The Confessions of a Recovering Writing Addict hits bookstores, I’ll be contractually obligated to endure the book tour circuit. My ideal stop? The Dick Cavett Show. Never mind that it no longer exists—I refuse to let reality get in the way of my delusions of grandeur.

    There I’ll be, perched in a velvet chair, resplendent in a custom-tailored suit that exudes effortless literary gravitas. Cavett, ever the urbane host, will hold up my book and, in his signature droll tone, read my opening line: “I’ve been given the most self-defeating assignment imaginable: I must write a book about my recovery from compulsive writing so that the telling of my recovery violates the terms of my sobriety.”

    He’ll pause, shaking his head in slow-motion admiration, as if momentarily overwhelmed by the sheer genius of what he’s just read. Then, locking eyes with me, he’ll say, “Mr. McMahon, I can say with the utmost confidence that this is the most stunning opening line in the history of literature. I just can’t tell you what a privilege it is to have you here this evening.”

    Not missing a beat, I’ll flash a knowing smile and reply, “Why thank you, Mr. Cavett, it is a pleasure to be here.”

    And that, my friends, will be the apotheosis of my existence. At last, I will be whole, and I will never need to write anything again. 

    Of course, this will never happen. Cavett is 88 years old and long retired, and I have about as much chance of appearing on his show as I do of discovering a lost Hemingway manuscript in my garage. But what’s the point of being a recovering writing addict if I can’t indulge in the occasional vanity-fueled fever dream?

    There’s something to be said for vanity. It fuels ambition, sharpens our skills, and occasionally tricks us into believing we’re on the brink of something great. 

    But there’s also a fine line between vanity and outright intoxication—the kind of fevered delusion that warps reality and blinds us to our own foolish pursuits. That line, precarious and often ignored, is summed up with brutal clarity by Lester Freamon in The Wire when he delivers a verbal gut punch to Jimmy McNulty, a cop too drunk on his own self-importance to see the inevitable crash ahead. Lester doesn’t sugarcoat it: “A parade? A gold watch? A shining Jimmy-McNulty-day moment, when you bring in a case so sweet everybody gets together and says, ‘Aw, shit! He was right all along. Should’ve listened to that man.’ The job won’t save you, Jimmy. It won’t make you whole, it won’t fill your ass up.”

    Freamon’s words aren’t just for McNulty—they’re a public service announcement for every poor soul who believes that work, achievement, or applause will stitch together the holes in their existence. The writing demon, in particular, suffers from this same pathology. It whispers the same lie to every desperate novelist: that one book, the book, will be the great reckoning, the masterpiece that finally justifies the years of toil, obscurity, and rejection. That single, seismic literary triumph will be the author’s redemption arc, a vindication of every abandoned manuscript, every humiliating book-signing with three attendees (one of whom just needed to use the bathroom). The magnitude of this delusion is staggering.

    Of course, if we define religion as an artist imposing their will on the culture so forcefully that they alter it for generations, then yes—certain artists have effectively founded religions. Take Sly Stone, whose music from the early ’70s didn’t just change the sound of funk, soul, and rock—it rewired the DNA of modern music entirely. His influence still echoes today, pulsing through the beats and harmonies of artists who weren’t even alive when There’s a Riot Goin’ On dropped. But did this cultural omnipresence make Sly Stone whole? Far from it. As Questlove’s documentary Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) reveals, Sly Stone’s genius was too expansive and untamed to be neatly packaged. Yet, when the world saw him as a prophet, they tried to shackle him to their own expectations.

    Every political movement, every special interest group wanted to claim a piece of his vision, to make him their voice. But Sly wasn’t a mascot—he was an artist, too grand and complex to be hijacked by anyone’s agenda. The weight of that expectation crushed him.

    And that’s the thing about cultural prophets—whether they’re musicians, writers, or even McNulty-level workaholics. The world cheers them on when they’re building their temples, but those same temples can become cages. The parade never comes. The gold watch doesn’t arrive. The moment of glorious, all-encompassing validation? It’s a mirage. And the writing demon, ever hungry, never learns.

  • Confessions of a Recovering Writing Addict

    Confessions of a Recovering Writing Addict

    I’ve been given the most self-defeating assignment imaginable: I must write a book about my recovery from compulsive writing so that the telling of my recovery violates the terms of my sobriety.

    The first symptoms of my affliction emerged in 1984, when I made the catastrophic mistake of reading A Confederacy of Dunces. John Kennedy Toole’s masterpiece introduced me to Ignatius J. Reilly—a bloated, hot dog–devouring medievalist in a world that had tragically moved on from the 14th century. With the conviction of a deranged prophet, Ignatius stomped through New Orleans, denouncing modernity as if civilization itself were a personal affront. His absurdity was electrifying, a revelation. That was the moment I became possessed.

    This wasn’t some harmless creative itch. This was a full-blown psychosis, the kind that whispers in your ear late at night and tells you this is your purpose. Worse, it took root at the exact moment I was an impressionable young man, inflated with the kind of intellectual vanity that only a 23-year-old can achieve. Watching Ignatius clash with reality, I had an epiphany—comedy wasn’t just entertainment; it was a weapon, a higher calling.

    And then came the real disaster: I became convinced that I was meant to be a satirical novelist. Not in a vague, “wouldn’t that be cool” way, but in a divinely ordained, words-branded-into-my-flesh-with-a-cattle-prod kind of way. It was not a career choice. It was fate.

    And so began my decades-long descent into literary madness.

    ***

    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.

  • 95% of books are just bloated short stories and essays with unnecessary padding

    95% of books are just bloated short stories and essays with unnecessary padding

    As part of my rehabilitation from writing novels I have no business writing, I remind myself of an uncomfortable truth: 95% of books—both fiction and nonfiction—are just bloated short stories and essays with unnecessary padding. How many times have I read a novel and thought, This would have been a killer short story, but as a novel, it’s a slog? How often have I powered through a nonfiction screed only to realize that everything I needed was in the first chapter, and the rest was just an echo chamber of diminishing returns?

    Perhaps someday, I’ll learn to write an exceptional short story—the kind that punches above its weight, the kind that leaves you feeling like you’ve just read a 400-page novel even though it barely clears 30. It takes a rare kind of genius to pull off this magic trick. I think of Alice Munro’s layered portraits of regret, Lorrie Moore’s razor-sharp wit, and John Cheever’s meticulous dissections of suburban despair. I flip through my extra-large edition of The Stories of John Cheever, and three stand out like glittering relics: “The Swimmer,” “The Country Husband,” and “The Jewels of the Cabots.” Each is a self-contained universe, a potent literary multivitamin that somehow delivers all the nourishment of a novel in a single, concentrated dose. Let’s call these rare works Stories That Ate a Novel—compact, ferocious, and packed with enough emotional and intellectual weight to render lesser novels redundant.

    As part of my rehabilitation, I must seek out such stories, study them, and attempt to write them. Not just as an artistic exercise, but as a safeguard against relapse—the last thing I need is another 300-page corpse of a novel stinking up my hard drive.

    But maybe this is more than just a recovery plan. Maybe this is a new mission—championing Stories That Eat Novels. The cultural winds are shifting in my favor. Attention spans, gnawed to the bone by social media, no longer tolerate literary excess. Even the New York Times has noted the rise of the short novel, reporting in “To the Point: Short Novels Dominate International Booker Prize Nominees” that books under 200 pages are taking center stage. We may be witnessing a tectonic shift, an age where brevity is not just a virtue but a necessity.

    For a failed novelist and an unapologetic literary wind-sprinter, this could be my moment. I can already see it—my sleek, ruthless 160-page collection, Stories That Eat Novels, four lapidary masterpieces gleaming like finely cut diamonds. Rehabilitation has never felt so good. Who says a man in his sixties can’t find his literary niche and stage an artistic rebirth? Maybe I wasn’t a failed novelist after all—maybe I was just a short-form assassin waiting for the right age to arrive.

  • The Accountant, the Hotpants, and My First Taste of Rejection

    The Accountant, the Hotpants, and My First Taste of Rejection

    The summer of 1972, I was ten years old, flying solo from LAX to Miami, parked in the coveted window seat. Next to me, in the middle, sat a blonde woman in her mid-twenties, bronzed to an unnatural, almost radioactive orange, legs crossed confidently beneath pink hotpants with purple and white racing stripes that suggested speed, danger, and an implied warning to stay in my lane.

    In the aisle seat: her conversational hostage, a lean, dark-haired man of about the same age—an accountant, he would later reveal, which felt like foreshadowing.

    For five hours, I listened as they engaged in a dialogue so lively, so animated, I assumed I was witnessing the early chapters of a great love story. She was in dental hygiene school. He had a degree and a steady job. She exuded the kind of effortless confidence that made her gum seem like a gift from the gods when she passed us each a stick of Dentyne, explaining that it would help pop our ears. A public service announcement, delivered with charm.

    The accountant was decent-looking, well-spoken, clearly trying his absolute best—and for five relentless hours, he kept her engaged. They laughed, they shared stories, they existed in a pocket of perfect airborne intimacy. To my ten-year-old brain, this was an ironclad courtship ritual. The chemistry was undeniable.

    Then, the landing. The taxi to the gate. The moment of truth.

    He asked her out.

    She declined. Politely. Firmly. Efficiently.

    My ten-year-old self was staggered. How was this possible? Hadn’t they just shared an entire cinematic romance arc? The witty banter? The shared laughter? The synchronized gum chewing? And yet—nothing.

    I tried to crack the mystery. Maybe he was too bland. Maybe she had a boyfriend. Maybe she just needed to kill five hours before she got back to real life. Whatever the reason, I, a mere child, absorbed his rejection as if it were my own.

    To this day, I remain personally wounded that she turned him down. She turned us down. And for what? Some other guy in tighter pants?

    That flight should have been a lesson in the arbitrary brutality of romance, but all I really learned was that rejection hurts, even when it’s not technically yours.

  • Magical Thinking #7: The Laws of Time Don’t Apply to Me

    Magical Thinking #7: The Laws of Time Don’t Apply to Me

    (or, The Fool’s Gamble Against Father Time)

    There’s a special kind of delusion that whispers in our ears: You’re different. You’re special. The rules don’t apply to you. Other people? Sure, they age, they lose opportunities, they watch time slip through their fingers. But you—you will defy time. You will live in a perpetual Now, a beautiful, untouchable bubble where youth, dreams, and endless possibility never fade.

    Phil Stutz has a name for the figure who shatters this illusion: Father Time—that grizzled old man with the hourglass, reminding us that our only real power lies in discipline, structure, and engagement with reality. Ignore him at your peril, because his wrath is merciless. Just ask Dexter Green, the tragic dreamer of Winter Dreams, who spends his life avoiding reality, chasing pleasure, and worshiping an illusion named Judy Jones.

    Dexter believes he can live outside the real world, feeding off the fantasy of Judy rather than engaging with anything substantial. And for a while, this works. But Father Time is patient, and when Dexter finally wakes up, it’s too late.

    Time Will Have Its Revenge

    At thirty-two, long past his days of chasing the unattainable Judy, Dexter sits in a business meeting with a man named Devlin—a conversation that will destroy his last illusions.

    Devlin delivers the blow: Judy is married now. Her name is Judy Simms, and her once dazzling, untouchable existence has collapsed into something horrifyingly mundane. Her husband is a drunk, an abuser, a tyrant. She is trapped in a miserable marriage to a man who beats her, then gets forgiven every time.

    The once invincible, radiant Judy Jones, breaker of hearts, goddess of his dreams, is now an exhausted, aging housewife living under the rule of a man who treats her like dirt.

    And just like that, Dexter’s winter dream crumbles into dust.

    The Ultimate Betrayal: Time Wins, Beauty Fades, Illusions Die

    The final insult comes when Devlin, with casual indifference, describes Judy as not all that special anymore—her once-mesmerizing beauty faded, her magic gone.

    “She was a pretty girl when she first came to Detroit,” he says, as if commenting on an old piece of furniture.

    For Dexter, this is not just a shock—it is the ultimate existential gut-punch.

    For two decades, he has nourished his soul on the fantasy of Judy Jones, believing that she was something otherworldly, untouchable, worth sacrificing real life for. Now, in a single afternoon, he learns she was never a goddess, never unique, never even particularly remarkable.

    Imagine having a high school crush, the Homecoming Queen, frozen in your memory as perfection itself. Then one day, you look her up on Facebook and she looks like Meat Loaf. That’s Dexter’s moment of reckoning.

    His fantasy was never real. His youth is gone. His life has been wasted chasing an illusion. And now, standing in the wreckage, he feels the full force of Father Time’s judgment.

    The “Butt on a Stick” Moment

    In America, we have a phrase for the soul-crushing moment when reality smacks you so hard you can’t even breathe:

    “Your butt has been handed to you on a stick.”

    Dexter’s life has collapsed in on itself, and his first instinct is the same as anyone caught in the throes of devastation: This shouldn’t be happening to me.

    But as Phil Stutz warns, that thought is pure insanity.

    It is happening. It already happened. The more you protest, the more stuck you become. Stutz calls this victim mentality, the psychological quicksand that keeps people from ever moving forward. Dexter has two choices:

    1. Wallow in his misery, trapped in the wreckage of his illusions.
    2. Learn from his suffering and use it as a tool for transformation.

    Breaking Free from the Winter Dream

    And here’s where things get interesting: now that Dexter’s fantasy has been obliterated, he is free.

    Yes, the truth is bitter. Yes, he wasted years chasing a ghost. But he is no longer chained to the illusion. The question now is: What does he do with that freedom?

    Does he just find another “winter dream” to chase, another illusion to waste his life on? Or does he finally grow up and engage with reality?

    What Would Phil Stutz Tell Dexter?

    Stutz, co-author of The Tools, has a philosophy: Pain is a tool, not a punishment.

    Most people, like Dexter, already know their problems. They just don’t know how to stop repeating them.

    • Dexter knows he was obsessed with Judy Jones.
    • Watch collectors know they keep rebuying the same watches they swore they’d never buy again.
    • Food addicts know they shouldn’t be devouring that entire pizza at 11 p.m.

    But knowing isn’t enough. You need tools to fight your worst instincts.

    The Tools: How to Stop Wasting Your Life

    Stutz realized that traditional therapy was useless—all it did was force people to dig deeper into their childhood wounds without ever giving them real solutions.

    So he created The Tools—specific actions that force people to break free from their psychological traps.

    Stutz doesn’t waste time on introspection without action. He knows that change happens when you move, engage, and disrupt your patterns.

    • Stop trying to “think” your way out of your misery. Take action.
    • Stop believing your problems are unique. They aren’t.
    • Stop assuming time will wait for you. It won’t.

    Part X: The Enemy Inside Your Head

    The biggest enemy to change is what Stutz calls Part X—the part of you that wants to stay stuck, wants to keep wallowing in old habits, wants to keep clinging to comforting fantasies instead of engaging with reality.

    And if you don’t fight Part X, you’ll waste your life exactly like Dexter did.

    Final Lesson: Get Out of the Maze

    If Dexter keeps fixating on his past, he will stay lost in the Maze—that endless loop of regret, nostalgia, and what-ifs that locks people in place while the world moves on without them.

    If he accepts reality, uses his pain as a tool, and engages with life, then he has a chance at something real.

    Because here’s the truth:

    Father Time will take everything from you—except the lessons you learn and the actions you take.

    Use them, or lose everything.

  • Magical Thinking #5: The Delusional Art of Repeating the Same Disaster and Expecting a Miracle

    Magical Thinking #5: The Delusional Art of Repeating the Same Disaster and Expecting a Miracle

    If insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results, then we are all a little insane—especially when it comes to our worst habits, our most toxic relationships, and our dumbest obsessions.

    Take the vampire relationship—a toxic, soul-sucking romance that drains you dry every time, yet you keep crawling back, convinced that this time it will be different. It never is. The fangs sink in, the life force drains out, and you’re left staring at the ceiling at 3 a.m., wondering how you let yourself get bit again.

    And if love isn’t your particular poison, maybe watch collecting is.

    Watch guys (myself included) have perfected a very specific brand of lunacy—thinking that selling a watch will cure our addiction. We convince ourselves: If I sell this, I’ll be free. This is the last one. I’m done. But before the ink on the eBay transaction dries, we’re rebuying it. And then reselling it. And then rebuying it again. It’s a closed-loop system of self-inflicted torment, a never-ending maze of false hope and regret.

    Dude. You need help. Read Phil Stutz, escape the Maze, and put your life in Forward Motion before your retirement fund turns into a pile of resale receipts and buyer’s remorse.

    If you think this brand of self-destruction through repetition is new, think again.

    F. Scott Fitzgerald saw it decades ago in Winter Dreams, where Dexter Green is hopelessly addicted to the walking emotional Ponzi scheme that is Judy Jones. She is his drug, his illusion, his vampire. She is untrustworthy, indifferent, and incapable of meaning what she says, yet he keeps coming back for more.

    Dexter isn’t just in love with Judy Jones—he’s in love with the idea of her, the fantasy that someday she’ll become what he wants her to be. She won’t. And as he wastes years orbiting her gravitational pull of destruction, real life passes him by. By the time he wakes up from the dream, it’s too late.

    Sound familiar? It should.

    Because whether it’s a vampire relationship, a doomed watch-buying cycle, or a delusional romance straight out of Fitzgerald’s nightmares, the result is always the same: life keeps moving forward while we stay stuck, trapped in our own bad decisions.

  • It’s impossible to overestimate Hugh Hefner’s Influence on 70s Culture

    It’s impossible to overestimate Hugh Hefner’s Influence on 70s Culture

    Mario Vargas Llosa opens his memoir about Flaubert’s masterpiece Madame Bovary with a startling confession: fictional characters have shaped his life more than real people. And among these literary phantoms, none has haunted him like Emma Bovary.

    He first encountered her as a broke student in Paris in 1959, reading Madame Bovary in his cramped, dimly lit apartment, where the novel consumed him like a “magic spell.” This wasn’t just a passing literary crush—Flaubert’s novel hardwired his taste in fiction. Llosa craves symmetry, structure, and bold architecture—stories that begin, unfold, and close like a perfectly executed aria, not those meandering, open-ended narratives that wander aimlessly like a lost tourist in a foreign city. He wants novels that sum up an entire existence, not ones that leave you guessing where the rest of the pages went.

    But his obsession with Madame Bovary isn’t just about its structural perfection. Llosa delights in its savage portrayal of stupidity, hypocrisy, cowardice, and self-complacent mediocrity. He sees Emma Bovary as a tragic hero, a woman who refuses to rot inside the coffin of bourgeois chastity, instead reaching for sensuality, opulence, and a life less suffocating. She fails, of course—spectacularly—but Llosa admires the rebellion even as he watches it collapse.

    His connection to Madame Bovary runs deeper than admiration. He sees himself in Emma. He shares her “stubborn despair, a profound distaste for life,” and her reckless excesses as an emotional counterattack against a cruel, indifferent world. Reading about Emma’s slow, agonizing suicide didn’t just illuminate the novel’s merciless social critique—it gave Llosa a new understanding of his own misery. In that sense, the book wasn’t just a masterpiece—it was a form of catharsis, a lifeboat thrown to him in turbulent waters.

    I recognize this kind of literary possession all too well. I had my own Madame Bovary moment—except it came in the form of A Confederacy of Dunces. When I read it, I saw the excesses of a young man crushed by his own emotional impoverishment, who built a fortress of grandiosity to shield himself from reality. Like Llosa with Emma, I saw a grotesque reflection of my own worst instincts. And, like him, I couldn’t look away.

    Recognizing the worst instincts in others—and in myself—was the fuel behind my ill-fated quest to be a comic novelist, a misadventure that, sadly, yielded nothing but abandoned drafts and existential nausea.

    Still, like Llosa, I found a perverse kind of clarity in my compulsion to chronicle human excess—a knack for spotting the gaudy, the grotesque, and the tragically misguided, then trapping it on the page like a butterfly pinned to a display case.

    If nothing else, I could always recognize an Emma Bovary type—vulgar, kitschy, overdosing on fantasies of grandeur—and I knew how to turn their delusions into cautionary tales, even if my own delusions proved immune to the lesson.

    I’m thinking of Playboy media magnate Hugh Hefner who fancied himself a rebel against bourgeois prudishness. Hugh Hefner, the prophet of smarmy male entitlement and silk-robe swagger. Hefner preached a gospel of unrepentant pleasure-seeking and Playboy-approved cosplay, designed to hypnotize women and soothe fragile male egos.

    And in the sweltering summer of 1977, I met one of Hefner’s most devout disciples: Glenn Leidecker.

    Every Saturday that summer, I practically melted into the scorched earth at Cull Canyon Lake, basted in Hawaiian Tropic Dark Tanning Oil—SPF Zero, because back then skin cancer was just a rumor. The sticky perfume of coconut and bananas was the scent of youth and poor decisions.

    Then there was Leidecker.

    Late twenties. Wavy brown hair, feathered to perfection. A thick, manicured mustache that could have been insured for thousands. An even, leathery tan stretched over a frame wearing nothing but blue Speedo briefs, a gold chain, and a white puka shell necklace draped over his hairy chest. His arsenal of seduction included a white Frisbee, a Playboy-logo cooler, and a boombox blasting the smooth seduction of Foreigner, Fleetwood Mac, and K.C. and The Sunshine Band.

    His moves were choreographed to the point of absurdity. Every Saturday, Leidecker ran the same pickup script on an endless rotation of bikini-clad women. I knew every line by heart: the $500 custom paint job on his Camaro, the humblebrag about his dad’s Bay Area clothing stores, the claim that he’d been managing those stores since high school, and the cherry on top—he was this close to landing a role in a Hollywood martial arts movie. Oh, and let’s not forget the constant invocation of “Parsons Estates,” which he dropped like it was some enchanted kingdom instead of a generic middle-class neighborhood.

    Leidecker wasn’t just a cliché. He was a valedictorian of Smarmy Male University, graduating magna cum laude in Playboy Posturing. His thesis? A cover-to-cover study of Eric Weber’s How to Pick Up Girls!, a sleazy manifesto that encouraged men to relentlessly harass women under the delusion that persistence equals success.

    Week after week, Leidecker reeled in a fresh catch, tossing Frisbees on the grassy knoll with women who didn’t yet realize they were extras in his sad little production. He wasn’t a man; he was a walking Playboy advertisement, the answer to that smug caption, “What sort of man reads Playboy?” Apparently, the kind of man who thinks speedos and gold chains are a mating call.

    I watched the mating ritual from my towel, pretending to read my parents’ dog-eared copy of The Happy Hooker while keeping a close eye on Leidecker. He was mid-Frisbee toss with two blonde girls in matching white bikinis when he let out an alarming, almost comical howl.

    “Oh my God, you stepped on a bee!” one of the girls gasped.

    Sure enough, the poor insect spun helplessly in the grass, stinger spent. But it was Leidecker who was spiraling. Sweat beaded on his bronzed skin, his Playboy cool starting to crack.

    But of course, he couldn’t just admit he was in agony. The kind of man who reads Playboy doesn’t crumble over a bee sting.

    “No big deal,” he puffed, wobbling on his rapidly swelling foot. “Just a little bee sting.”

    By now, his foot had ballooned into something resembling a Christmas ham, and a shiny coat of sweat slicked his once-confident swagger. Still, he insisted, “I’m fine. Really. Let’s keep playing.”

    Because the kind of man who reads Playboy is a warrior. He doesn’t show weakness. He doesn’t feel weakness.

    Until he did.

    Leidecker’s tough-guy act evaporated in an instant. His eyes bulged with panic, his breath turned ragged, and then—like a poorly written action hero meeting his karmic comeuppance—he crumpled to the ground, hyperventilating into anaphylactic shock.

    Did he survive? No idea. But if this were fiction, he’d be stone-cold dead—a sacrificial lamb on the altar of poetic justice: Death by vanity, wrapped up with a neat moral bow. 

    Like Llosa, I’ve always gravitated toward narratives with crisp, decisive endings—no ambiguity, no loose threads, no “life just goes on” cop-outs. I crave stories with bold structures and brutal symmetry, because, deep down, I need them. I need fables, cautionary tales, and tragic blueprints to ward off the self-destructive instincts swirling inside me. If life refuses to provide a clean conclusion, then dammit, fiction will.