“My social status in the last year has gone from zero to hero.”
Andrea Hickey / BuzzFeed
For many years — nearly 20 — I have lived far away from many of the people I love best. But we still feel close, because we write long, private, free-form letters. It's good practice for writing stories and novels, apparently. So when I was hailed as a genius for publishing The Wallcreeper and offered serious money to publish Mislaid, my first thought was, If I can do this, so can all my friends! Immediately, I started enlisting them.
Terror management theory (a psychosocial hypothesis) tells us that culture fills an urgent void in our lives. "Life in itself is nothing," as Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, "an empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs." Participation in finer, higher things takes our minds off life's cruelty. Under TMT, writers are people who see a potential match between their abilities and literary culture's intimations that writing is one of those finer, higher things that transcend death — not literally, not as immortality, but as reasons to take courage and feel relatively cheerful. Like beautiful homes, cute babies, or noble careers helping others, books can make us feel like we mean something positive, and in gratitude we truly love them.
Even readers who never aspire to write books can read, write reviews, and participate in literary culture in other ways. Belief makes it all worthwhile, while seeing through to life's empty-cupness brings mourning, depression, and fear. When the lovely home is lost in a divorce, when the aging baby chews pizza with its mouth open, when experts determine that the noble career enabled dependence and learned helplessness — books will still be there for you.
Thus, while my belief that books matter is irrational, it is (with my other beliefs) vital to my survival. It tells me that certain books — like certain people, animals, places, processes, and experiences — are ends in themselves, worth valuing for their own sake, and that while many of these books are hundreds of years old, some are still being written…
…by me! That's what the experts say! ME!!! In literary culture, appointed experts decide which books make the cut, and some of them think my books are really good! In my own belief system, I occupy a position near the top!
Andrea Hickey / BuzzFeed
And because virtually everyone I know well is a Person of the Book like me — starting with those few devoted letter writers, but with a conspicuous current trend toward exponential increase and a possible snowballing event; a novelist meets a lot of book lovers — they all seem to agree that I matter. My social status in the last year has gone from zero to hero. Where will it all end? Recently, total strangers wanted to have a formal dinner party in my honor, like in the last (?) episode of Sex and the City where Carrie blows off those Parisians because she's too busy following Mikhail Baryshnikov around some art gallery. (I got out of it by dropping in preemptively for teriyaki in the kitchen with the kids.) A stranger offered me a tenure-track job at an Ivy League school! I was invited to the Edinburgh Festival! A photo editor asked me who she should book for makeup and hair! Cultural significance is by far the best job I ever had. In a pinch I can pass the time just sitting there congratulating myself.
My friends who, if they were to write novels as well as letters, could also quit their day jobs in favor of transcendence IMO, in no particular order: Avner (meaning Avner Shats, already a novelist, but I'm convinced he could make a living writing), Johanna, Ben, Chantal…
Yet who among them has what it takes to pull down a seven-figure advance? Who will be flying us all to his 50th birthday party at some huge, tacky spread in Baja?
Not a novelist, but a memoirist: James P. Graham of West Philadelphia.
Yes, Jamie, this means you. For too long I have retailed your anecdotes while misremembering them. e.g., "Crusty Mattress-Back" with its image of your putting on a bathrobe, driven to the semblance of nudity by your lack of a shirt without a leftist or anarchist slogan on it, rushing to explain to the policeman at the door how the dead 14-year-old came to be in your bathtub; the uncritical readiness with which he believed the truth — that she had been revived by EMTs, then wandered off to rejoin the very friends who thought to shock her into life by packing her in ice. Of her friends and the police, whose nihilism was the more obscene, whose ignorance more troubling? I will quote no one (spoilers). All I can say is, my god. Or "Adolf," the shy young Nazi with poor social skills. Why was he always hanging around the anarchist bookstore, of all places, accepted and tolerated even as he entered pro-Axis screeds into its collective diary ("Book of Unlove") in dense black Fraktur script? Granted, even Nazis have their limits, but did his annoying ways constitute sufficient reason for them to abandon him on the porch wrapped in a carpet? Was "mutilation of a corpse" truly the relevant criminal charge?
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Why Cultural Significance Is The Best Job I Ever Had