The event will feature female critics, including Rumpus contributors like Michelle Orange and Michelle Dean, in conversation about “the women they’ve been inspired by, the challenges of being a woman of sharp mind and pen, and the question of whether women have a distinct purpose as critics at all.”

See the event pages on Housing Works and/or Facebook for more details.

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Come to the Powerhouse Arena (37 Main Street) this Wednesday, February 27th from 7 – 9 pm for the book launch for Michelle Orange‘s This is Running for Your Life. She will be joined in discussion with James Lasdun, author of Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked.

Click here for more information on the event and to RSVP.

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1. Setting Up The Interview, The Part About Us

The Rumpus: So… um… like what I’ll do is I’ll try to type your answers, but then I’ll also have them recorded.

Michelle Orange: Interesting.

Rumpus: Is it going to be too disruptive if I’m sitting next to you and you can see the screen?

Orange: Kind of. No. I don’t know. 

Rumpus: Because I can get a chair and sit over there or something.

Orange: That would be more distracting.

Rumpus: Normally I sit across from the person and they can’t see the screen. 

Orange: But they can still hear you typing. Like a stenographer. 

Rumpus: It hasn’t been a problem before.

Orange: Why do you like to do that?

Rumpus: It saves time.

Orange: Oh, it’s a time saving mechanism. But if I’m saying something that’s not interesting will you not bother to type it and then I’ll see you not typing it? This is suddenly very stressful. I’ll see you judging me in real time. Not that I don’t, generally.

Rumpus: If anything I’m the one that’s always nervous about being judged.

Orange: I’ve accepted everything about you.

Rumpus: That’s the thing. You’ve accepted.

Orange: I’ve completely settled.

Rumpus: This was actually something I was going to bring up when talking about your book, This Is Running For Your Life. I’ve always felt like you’re so smart and it makes me nervous because I feel like you see all this bad stuff and decide whether or not to put up with it.

Orange: I don’t think that’s a result of being smart. I think probably a lot of people have that relationship to you. Is that something you feel about other people?

Rumpus: I mean women, as a genre. 

Orange: We’re a genre.

Rumpus: Particularly you. Because you notice these tiny details. I think most people don’t. 

Orange: And that makes you nervous. 

Rumpus: It’s always been a thing.

Orange: Would the alternative be better, if I just didn’t notice anything about you?

Rumpus: Then you wouldn’t be you and I don’t know if it would be better. We’re talking about a different person. I like you the way you are. 

Orange: Well that’s nice. I guess.

2. The Part About The Book That’s Still Really The Part About Us

Rumpus: Is this your first time being interviewed for your essay collection?

Orange: No, I was interviewed by Publisher’s Weekly a couple months ago. It was pretty quick. 

Rumpus: What’s the genesis of This Is Running For Your Life?

Orange: I wrote the book basically so I could bring about this exact moment.

Rumpus: What do you mean?

Orange: So I could force you into a captive format and you would have to ask me questions about myself. 

Rumpus: That makes sense.

Orange: Yeah. It’s been about ten years and this was my only option really. This is what I was left with; I better write a book. 

Rumpus: That’s not true. I ask you about yourself all the time. 

Orange: No, you don’t. 

Rumpus: I mean percentage-wise it might be less, maybe 40/60.

Orange: OK.

3. Finally Talking About The Book

Rumpus: I feel like this essay collection, This Is Running For Your Life, is about several things that are summed up in the blurbs on the back in very simple terms, i.e. social media, the modern world. But you’re actually writing about much bigger ideas than that. 

Orange: I’ve tried to think about ways to sum up the book when people ask what it’s about and I still have a hard time. Though it’s better now than while I was writing it. You don’t really know what you’re writing about until it’s done. But I knew I wanted to write about time, and limits. I wanted to try and identify a predicament, consider its ambivalences and contradictions, and find my own experience within it. But mostly it had to do with time.

Rumpus: You feel like you’re writing about time? 

Orange: Yeah. Death, time. 

Rumpus: Because I was thinking you were writing about loneliness a lot. 

Orange: I’m always writing about loneliness. 

Rumpus: In the last essay, “Ways Of Escape,” you mention that in college you only knew one or two people. You’re supposed to meet a guy at one point and you blow him off, though you like him a lot. This is a period of your life where you’re running twenty miles every day. And it reads as a kind of self-avoidance through ritual.

Orange: Writing that essay was trying to figure out what happened during those years and what that period of my life was about. What I came up with was that my relationship to time had gotten completely out of whack. It seemed like there was way too much of it. It was closing in on me and I needed to try to find a way to get around it until I could figure out a way to be.

Rumpus: I’d like to understand what you’re saying as to how it’s about time. 

Orange: You texted me yesterday asking what people do on Saturdays, like you didn’t know how to pass the day. That’s how I felt all the time. Running gave me something to do. I was twenty, twenty-one years old. And it turned out to be this thing where through running I could escape the sense that I should be doing something, that I should have a better idea of what my life was about. 

Rumpus: You didn’t want to misuse your time. 

Orange: I wanted to feel like I was accomplishing something. And for whatever reason what I came up with was running twenty miles. I was in school, but that took up a handful of hours a week and the rest of the time I didn’t seem to be able to sustain social or romantic relationships. It’s complicated. Don’t you look back on periods of your life and think, So what was that about? 

Rumpus: I feel like I’m still in that exact period of my life.

Orange: There are all these things that are so obvious in retrospect. I was driving my mother’s car back to my father’s house every weekend and literally running, circling my entire town, where all my friends had scattered. At the time I was completely baffled as to why I was doing anything I was doing.

4. The Part About The Rumpus

Rumpus: Is the book mostly pieces you had already written?

Orange: No. I wrote first drafts of six of the essays in six months and the other four were heavily reworked and expanded. 

Rumpus: Didn’t this come out of writing for The Rumpus? 

Orange: Yeah. In a way. Because when The Rumpus started you were looking for people to write and I had been on this grind of trying to survive as a freelancer. I had my head down for several years, trying to get myself stable and writing a lot of reviews and film and book stuff. I’d been striving to get published in the places I thought you were supposed to get published because I thought that would carry me to this wonderful place I was supposedly trying to go. Then the recession hit and my schedule opened up. And I found it was the things on The Rumpus that got the response I had been hoping for. I thought, I should keep going in this direction. These are the things people are more interested in reading about and I’m having more fun writing about them. 

Rumpus: These were the things that were important to you so they had energy.

Orange: Yeah. That must be it. But there’s both having to make a living and feeling like you need to hit these certain milestones. And I probably did lose a bit of that thing that I liked back when I was working in an office and I could spend my spare time writing about whatever I wanted and exploring who I could be as a writer.

5. The Part About Joan Didion and David Foster Wallace 

Rumpus: Let’s talk about the San Diego essay, “The San Diego Of My Mind.” What was that supposed to be about and what did it end up being about? 

Orange: It was supposed to be about this new trend in focus groups of using fMRI machines to look inside people’s brains in order to gauge their response to a product. In the case of the firm that I visited that product was often a movie. It was supposed to be about what it might mean if this kind of market research catches on. And it ended up being about those things but also about my exhaustion with certain kinds of movies and the possibility that this kind of research poses a profound threat to the way we think about art and subjectivity. 

Rumpus: This is a stupid thing to say but you’re clearly operating in the lineage of Joan Didion and Susan Sontag. Do you feel that element in the work or do you feel apart from that?

Orange: Um… 

Rumpus: Like the way Joan Didion is trying to make sense of her experience through story, and Sontag’s obsession with images.

Orange: That’s what I meant about the book being an expression of my influences and preoccupations up to this point. Though I came to Joan Didion relatively late. I have this sense that her presence is not as definitive in Canada as it is here, but maybe that’s just my excuse for not having her on my radar early on. I did know, once I had this opportunity and was sitting down to figure out what the book could be, that it was time to revisit her work. With the Hawaii essay, “War And Well Being,” in particular I felt that Didion was someone you have to reckon with. If you’re going to write on that subject, in this format and in that place, you have to write through her first. 

Rumpus: What’s that essay about? 

Orange: It details a trip that I took to Honolulu in 2011 to attend the annual conference of the American Psychiatric Association and try to get some perspective on the writing of the new DSM-V manual.

Rumpus: I think about you and I think of The White Album. When Didion writes, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” that could be you writing that.

Orange: That could be a lot of writers. I think about you. We’re all Joan Didion, especially in the eyes of copywriters.

Rumpus: You could easily have written that essay. 

Orange: Oh my god. 

Rumpus: It just feels like within your wheelhouse. 

Orange: You’re not necessarily aware of all the ways you’ve been influenced. Reading David Foster Wallace, I always have that sense of having been influenced indirectly. Somehow he seeped into the atmosphere and I didn’t necessarily have to read everything that he had written to completely absorb and be affected by it. 

Rumpus: But you were really into him. 

Orange: Yeah. 

Rumpus: Not just the writing but also the way of being a little bit. Like I remember we were talking about his interview with Charlie Rose. I don’t remember what you said. 

Orange: I don’t remember what I said, either. 

Rumpus: But you weren’t just thinking about his writing, you were thinking about how he was wrestling with himself and you related to that. 

Orange: He had some exchange with Charlie Rose where Wallace says, “I don’t want to look like a blah blah blah,” and Charlie Rose gets exasperated and says, “Just don’t worry about what you look like!” And Wallace says, “Well there’s nothing that stimulates your What Do I Look Like gland like being on television.” It was such a crazy thing for Charlie Rose to say: “Oh David, you child, don’t worry about what people are going to think of you while they’re watching you on television.” As though we’re all supposed to be born to be on television and have interviews with Charlie Rose. Which I guess we are. But for someone like Wallace, it must have been torture.

6. The Part About Closure

Rumpus: Do you worry at all with this book you’re going to be more out there than you’ve been before?

Orange: Yeah. Don’t you worry about that? With books? You like that, though. I have a conflicting thing of where I like it and I don’t like it. Speaking of David Foster Wallace, those are the things that I related to the most in his biography. This idea that there was a part of him, like a reading he did at a Harper’s event, where he absolutely dreads it up until the moment he does it, but then he loves the reception that he gets, and then he goes back to hating it. I feel like I’m very much like that. It’s like you want attention but you don’t want attention. You want it on your own terms but you sort of forge ahead anyway. It makes me nervous, but I can’t stop doing it. 

Rumpus: But the essays are so personal, and you write a lot of stuff that’s not that personal. So I just imagine that would be a different feeling. 

Orange: You mean I write reviews and stuff and those are less personal? The first thing I ever published was very personal in the way I think you mean. The last essay is kind of about that, this impulse. And the idea that I want to control it or make it useful somehow. It doesn’t feel like a bad impulse necessarily. 

Rumpus: In my experience I’m just using the tools I have to tell the story. But the whole desire to write and be a writer is such a strange thing. Really hard to explain. 

Orange: I know. I think my parents would like an answer. I don’t have one.

Rumpus: I wanted to talk more about the individual essays but now I feel like we have an interesting interview. What did I miss? 

Orange: I don’t know. I don’t feel like I said anything very good.

***

art by Michelle Orange

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Thanks, ELLE!

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MONDAY, October 12, 2009 – SUNDAY, October 18, 2009

This week in New York, The New Yorker Festival hits town. And yes, while the “Humor Revue,” “About Towns,” and “Kaffeeklatches” seem to have been sold out before they were on sale, there’re still some good readings and “Screen Gems”  available, and a slim, if precariously so, window for getting tickets to sold-out events (see below) – and see a full schedule here; A Festival of Frightening Movies begins at Lincoln Center, and Spike Jonze week continues a the MOMA, in celebration of the Friday release of Where the Wild Things Are.

MONDAY 10/12: Spike Jonze: Award-Winning Music Videos, Short Films and Commercials, Part 2 (100 min.) Museum of Modern Art. 8:00pm.

Brian Evenson and Mary Caponegro read at McNally Jackson. 7pm.

Scary Movies 3, “A Festival of the Frightening,” begins at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and runs through 10/22. Monday night is zombie night with Night of the Living Dead and Dead Alive.

Binnie Kirshenbaum reads at the New School. 6:30pm.

TUESDAY 10/13: Reckoning with Torture – The ACLU, PEN American Center and Cooper Union host this event at which writers and artists along with a former U.S. military interrogator and a former CIA officer will read from recently released secret documents that have brought to light the torture and abuse carried out by the U.S. under the Bush administration since 9/11. Featuring George Saunders, A.M. Homes, Art Spiegelman, Jonathan Ames, Nell Freudenberger among many renowned writers and a special presentation by Jenny Holzer. The Great Hall at Cooper Union. 7 E. 7th St. 7:00pm.

CLMP hosts Periodically Speaking at the New York Public Library – An event series that presents writers from three influential lit mags returns to the NYPL: Vestal Review presents fiction writer Lincoln Michel, Low Rent presents poet Leigh Stein and Tin House presents non-fiction writer Montana Wojczuk.

Lucky Dragons and Rose Lowder: A Benefit for Showpaper – LA-based electronic outfit Lucky Dragons “whose participatory performances jam 21st century musique concrete with the fervor of a tent revival” will “play around” in dialogue with five films by leading French experimental filmmaker Rose Lowder. Light Industry. Tickets, “sliding scale” $5-$20.

WEDNESDAY 10/14: Lorrie Moore, whose novel A Gate at the Stairs was just released by Knopf, reads at Symphony Space. 7:30pm.

Garfunkel and Oates, the LA-based comedy duo, Riki Lindhome (My Best Friend’s Girl) and Kate Micucci (Scrubs), whose song “Sex with Ducks” caused a mild stir in the political blogosphere, perform at the Gotham Comedy Club. 208 W. 23rd. 6:30pm.

Daniel Johnston, the legend of lo-fi tape-recorded-in-my-parents-basement music performs at Highline Ballroom. 431 W. 16th. Indie-folk band The Dodos play at Bowery Ballroom. 6 Delancey St.

Nick Lowe - English singer-songwriter performs at City Winery. 9:00pm.

Victor Lavalle, author of Slapboxing with Jesus, reads at The New School. 6:30pm.

THURSDAY 10/15: Scary Movies 3 at the FSLC – director John Landis will appear in person to present his Lycanthropian classic An American Werewolf in London.

FRIDAY 10/16: Tickets to The New Yorker Festival can still be got on Friday from 12-4:00pm at Cedar Lake Theatre, 547 West 26th Street, or online here. Tickets will also be available for sale one hour before the scheduled performances.

The New Yorker Festival – “Fiction Night” is just that, a night of readings, many of which are still, surprisingly, available. Some highlights are Daniyal Mueenuddin and Salman Rushdie; David Bezmogis and Jonathan Franzen; Edwidge Danticat and Junot Diaz; George Saunders and Gary Shteyngart; Jonathan Lethem and Colson Whitehead; Joshua Ferris and Aleksandar Hemon; T.C. Boyle and Mary Gaitskill.

Where the Wild Things Are, the new film, an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s children’s book, directed by Spike Jonze, and co-written with Dave Eggers, is released nationally. This is Jonze’s first feature film since Adaptation (2002).

Spike Jonze: Award Winning Commercials and Jackass: The Movie (2002). MOMA. 8:00pm.

Legendary punk singer Patti Smith performs with her daughter Jesse at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in celebration of the 50th anniversary of photographer Robert Frank’s collection “The Americans.”

SATURDAY 10/17: The New Yorker Festival – Saturday presents a kind of pu-pu platter of filmic/music happenings and specialty talks and panels. See Malcolm Gladwell give a talk on dogfighting felon Michael Vick, watch Alfred Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt” with David Denby, or listen to “conversations with music” between Sasha Frere-Jones and Neko Case, or Bon Iver. Some interesting panels include “New Math” that will likely deal with statistics, sports, politics and urban ethnography.

SUNDAY 10/18: The New Yorker Festival – Sunday at the festival is more relaxed, interactive and art-oriented with outings to the studio of Chuck Close and puppeteer Basil Twist, a “Humor Revue” with Woody Allen, George Saunders and Noah Baumbach, “Kaffeeklatches” (which somehow implies the subjects will have their guard down and maybe say things that will make you feel like you know them as people, or unintentionally reveal something too personal), like “Heroes and Antiheroes” with Donald Antrim, A.M. Homes, Gary Shteyngart and George Saunders; There’s “Radical Opera,” a panel at which Rufus Wainwright and superstar theater/opera/TV director Peter Sellars will tell you how blow-away opera is becoming and that it’s not dying, it’s just no longer Brunhildes in horns.

The Tag Reading Series – The “inter-borough, inter-state and nearing international!” reading series continues in Brooklyn: Jami Attenberg (The Melting Season) introduces Kristin McGonigle (New Yorker, originally from Philadelphia) who introduces our own Michelle Orange (Brooklynite originally from Toronto), who tags Mary Miller (who lives in Mississippi) who reaches back and tags Nicolle Elizabeth (Brooklynite originally from Boston), landing us safely back in Brooklyn. “They’ll be reading stories that got started by an overheard remark and an unfinished Fitzgerald story idea, about bad women with worse judgement, and an aging psychic.” The Cell Theatre. 338 West 23 St. (between 8 and 9 Aves). 5:00pm. $5.

Spike Jonze: Award-Winning Music Videos and Short Films, Part 1. MOMA. 2:00pm.

***

Send info about notable things happening around New York to rozalia-at-therumpus-dot-net.

Illustration by André da Loba.

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My father knew he had a jealous daughter, and I knew he was impervious: the books—and the inner life he cultivated with tremendous discipline—would always win.

Toward the end of my precocious phase—age 25 or so—I took to asking friends and family members the roughly three dozen questions that make up Proust’s famous questionnaire. Face conveniently buried in a hard-bound spiral notebook, I fired off questions I would never have had the nerve to ask without pencil and pretense in hand. With badly feigned disinterest I took down their dearest hopes and laments, their insecurities and  mottos, and somewhere in the middle of those was this: What or who is the greatest love of your life? This was the big one, the kill shot; I could never get it out without a quaver. “Erica,” said my ex-boyfriend. “Susan,” said my soon-to-be ex-boyfriend. “Jason”; “I don’t know”; “My father.” That last one was mine. And my father’s reply? “Literature,” he said simply, without even a courtesy pause.

John Orange and Hanger-On

My most enduring childhood image of my father, an English professor and the most devoted reader this side of an Yemeni madrasa, is of his body laid out in a kind of horizontal prayer position on his bed: two cushions under his neck, thin-socked, kayak-skinny feet crossed at the ankles, and a book propped open above his elbows, 60-watt halo from the bedside table gilding his silhouette. The tableau is framed from a distance because that’s how I usually observed it as a kid—from the hall and then the bedroom door, where I would stand with the patience of a ninja, bored cross-eyed and stubbornly awaiting acknowledgment.

My father was a worthy opponent. After a few minutes I would make incremental moves—slow and silent enough to avoid being ejected outright—toward the bed, where I would perch, then recline, then snoodge closer until my head was right on his shoulder. I’d press my face against his and read along, trying to catch his eyeline and get lost wherever it was he had gone. Eventually I would cede defeat but not surrender, kicking off to get a book of my own and read alongside him. I suspect that pleased him most but he was never one to gloat.

The Young Professor

My father knew he had a jealous daughter, and I knew he was impervious: the books—and the inner life he cultivated with tremendous discipline—would always win. His most cunning move was heading off a lifelong grudge match by teaching me to read when I was three years old. The thing took: a blissful show-off, I loved to recite, and especially liked writing things for my father to read—a neat trick, a backdoor I discovered early. In grade five I won a poetry contest and the prize was a bookstore gift certificate: second to a Snoopy Sno-Cone machine, it was my heart’s desire. I bought a set of children’s classics—The Secret Garden, Black Beauty, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe—and crimped the pages between my fingers with my own ankles x’d at the foot of my bed, my own bedside lamp blazing.

At the end of every school year my father worried out loud that his students, increasingly observed to be approaching higher education as a sort of resume-building formality, had just read their last book. I got the same treatment when I graduated, although I never stopped reading and soon began writing; my neat trick became a knack. I began taking my father’s constant suggestions without the spoonful of sugar, and was introduced to some of my favorite books: The Quincunx, Earthly Powers, Oryx and Crake. Occasionally he’d take mine, though as I got older I stopped sulking when he didn’t add my latest rave to his list—the realization of just how thoroughly better read, in every possible way, my father is than I may ever hope to be humbles me continuously: he’ll catch up to David Foster Wallace when I finally double back to Dostoevsky.

Re-Commencement, Spring '09

This September is the first one in my lifetime, and the first in his past forty years, when my father hasn’t begun a new school year, along with several thousand co-eds, in London, Ontario. His office was cleared out with the dorms this spring, groaning cartons of books and knick-knacks are now displaced in my childhood home’s basement, awaiting a frankly highly unlikely shelf-building initiative. During the spring’s circuit of high profile speeches meant to inspire students just starting out in the world, I thought also of those, like my father, facing a kind of re-commencement, a similar uncertainty—a return to the sock-dropping prospect of freedom, if not free-fall.

“I know that I can retire safely, without feeling lost,” my father told me several years ago, “because all my life I have practiced enjoying my own company.” Friends whose fathers have recently retired tell stories of sudden and plunging depressions, marriages capsizing, foundations imploding when the retiree’s professional persona fell away. But literature, not teaching, is the love of my father’s life, and in a way, just like the kids he shared the staged with at this year’s convocation, he has spent most of his life preparing for this moment.

In recent months his emails have been seeded with uneasy joshes about the future, the loss of a certain status, and an even more certain salary—the word “dotage” has recurred. I know, as I know myself and my own introverted ways, that the line between interiority and withdrawal requires a pitiless referee, and I worried abstractly about my father losing step with his chosen companion—preferring to reminisce about the good old novels, perhaps, or succumbing to a 70-year itch. Then a note arrived: “I have ordered Infinite Jest,” he wrote. “I’ll finally have the time to read it, anyway.” That’s my 67-year-old newly retired father, I thought; the man is unstoppable.

So while my dad will undoubtedly enjoy a suitably itinerant, active retirement, when I think of the coming years I return instead to the image of his long frame in repose, a thousand-page whopper balanced on his chest, concentration radiating from some vigorous, supernal core. I keep him there—I think I always will—because that’s where he’s most content, and where I know he’s safe.

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First off, I had no idea that Diablo Cody, of Juno fame, had written Jennifer’s Body. From the previews, the film appears to be little more than a sex-and-blood vehicle for America’s current wet dream infatuation, star Megan Fox.  But reading Orange’s article—which cites feminist readings of horror films and the perplexing revelation that “recent box office receipts show that women have an even bigger appetite for these [horror] films than men” to engage in a fascinating investigation of the role of women in horror—the new movie seems much more interesting than its base preview would imply.

Viewed as a sort of “Trojan horse” for feminist ideas and beliefs by Cody, Jennifer’s Body is further described by Orange as presenting a multi-layered “portrait of female identity in flux.”  Heavy, intellectual stuff.  And you pigs were only going to go see it to catch an eyeful of Fox eating some guy’s intestines and then making out with Amanda Seyfried.  Sheesh. Men.

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The piece, entitled “Beirut Rising,” “entertains with its amusing depiction of the Lebanese passion for plastic surgery, but the essay also penetrates deep into to the sadness at the city’s core.”

In order to highlight the piece, VQR‘s Anna Sheaffer asked Michelle 6 questions to “get her thoughts on Beirut’s political future, travel writing, and reporting in territory where journalists are suspect.”

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Humpday takes the concept to a whole new level though, with two old college friends meeting up ten years later to shoot an indie straight-dude on straight-dude porn flick. Safe to say this one is going to be a lil’ edgier than I Love You Man.

Our own Michelle Orange (who discussed Shelton’s second feature film, My Effortless Brilliance, here) has an intimate profile in The New York Times on Shelton in which she discusses Shelton’s optimism, her many hats (Shelton is a “poet-author, dancer-actress, [...] photographer-video artist, writer-editor and [...] director”), her past films, and her  “vaulting laughter.”

As a man who has been in my fair share of bromances I was already looking forward to Humpday, but do so now more than ever after reading Orange’s “She’s a Director Who’s Just Another Dude.”

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In the last Nation, Michelle Orange picks apart A Life in Letters, a book of Graham Greene’s correspondence edited by Richard Greene (no relation, really, she checked). Orange decries RG’s tendency toward hagiography, an inclination she concludes is the result of an aging vendetta between Greene’s detractors and champions. That is, RG wants to restore Greene’s place in the canon while simultaneously downplaying the dirt literary detectives have dug up and heaped upon, in recent years, Greene’s character. Such is the trench warfare of human history. But, despite straying outside the narrow bounds of objectivity, says Orange, RG’s book manages “a steady, inviting flicker, punctuated by the occasional psychic bonfire.” The people that populate Greene’s stories are unfailingly failures–but primarily so on a personal level. They are people wedded to so-called selfless professions (a preacher, say) who have become mired in selfishness, or worse. They are people who swoon and swear love only to be overcome, mere months later, by tendrils of doubt before being swept willingly into full-blown betrayal. This is why it’s most compelling to ponder Greene’s own internal fracturing. While in a hospital, for instance, Greene witnessed a child die. He wrote this letter to a friend: “Are people who write entirely & absolutely selfish, darling? Even though in a way I hated it yesterday evening—one half of me was saying how lucky it was—added experience—& I kept on catching myself trying to memorise details—Sister’s face, the faces of the other men in the ward. And I felt quite excited aesthetically. It made one rather disgusted with oneself.”

Good writers avoid, or gloss over, their own contradictions. Great writers go toward them, into them, like Dante into Hell.

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