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2002-05-02

I stumbled across this quotation from a David Foster Wallace interview in Salon (emphasis mine):

It's probably like this in anything. I see my students do this with me. You're a young writer. You admire an older writer, and you want to get to where that older writer is. You imagine that all the energy that your envy is putting into it has somehow been transferred to him, that there's a flipside to it, a feeling of being envied that's a good feeling the way that envy is a hard feeling. You can see it as the idea of being in things for some kind of imaginary goal involving prestige rather than for the pursuit itself. It's a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you � I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out?

He is so damn smart. (Did I ever mention here that back before he became superfamous I wrote him a fan letter and he wrote back a gracious little typed note with a hand-drawn smiley face by his signature? That made me like him even more.)

Anyway, this reminds me of something that I sort of forgot about that happened last week. You may recall my discussing a girl I hung out with when I lived in New York who had been getting quite a bit of attention for her playwriting. Well, she just won the Pulitzer. (And I guess I live under a rock for I just learned that she also got one of those MacArthur Foundation genius grants.)

I was driving to pick up Clay at daycare to take him to the doctor when I learned of these two awards and it churned up all the predictable stuff in me. To a lesser degree, I believe, than this kind of thing has done in the past, but enough that half an hour later when B phoned he could hear something in my voice. So I told him about this girl's having won the Pulitzer Prize. And he said, "That's okay, you won the Poopy Diaper Prize."

And I laughed and felt a little better. I'm not exactly sure why or how; I know it is not so simple as I have a baby and that's somehow better or more important than having writerly success. (For the record, I know nothing of this woman's present personal life, though my sense when we were both in our early twenties was that having a family of her own was low--or perhaps non-existent--on her priority list.) Maybe his comment reminded me of that truth on which I occasionally lose my grasp: I am on my own path.

Here's a fairly recent picture of Clay, by the way. Some eyes on that kid, huh?

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