“In the end nothing matters but the work. You can’t control how it’s taken, and the act of telling a story always involves a gap. Sometimes confusion is the risk of ambiguity–I say that to students all the time.”
The New York Times published an entire review of Patrick Somerville’s This Bright River having mixed up the identities of two characters within the first five pages of the book. Somerville writes about why he is not angry about the error, while reflecting on the gap inherent to storytelling and the importance of phantom relationships in our lives.
