Both my parents wrote. Not professionally — there were no published books, no bylines — but writing was simply part of how they moved through the world. My mother wrote stories. My father wrote letters, long ones, even when shorter ones would have served. Growing up around this, I ...Read More
There is a version of this that most people recognise in hindsight. You're standing at a party — or a dinner, or a work event that ran long — and you've already decided you want to leave. But instead of leaving, you spend the next forty minutes doing ...Read More
To understand the distance between then and now, it helps to put numbers on the American household of the early 1970s. The median new single-family home completed in the United States was about 1,525 square feet in 1973. Two-car households were still uncommon — just 29.3 percent of ...Read More
King's argument, when you strip away the prolific-novelist mystique, is uncomfortable. He is not saying you should write quickly because you'll get more done that way. He is essentially saying that if you don't write quickly, the thing you started will not be the same thing by the ...Read More
Hemingway said this, or some version of it, and the line has been floating around the wider culture ever since, attached in most cases to a black-and-white photo of him looking weathered on a fishing boat. The standard absorption tends to receive it as a moody line about ...Read More
There is a particular kind of toughness that the adults I have been watching across the last decade, the ones who were raised in the 1960s and 1970s, have been carrying into late life. The toughness is real. The toughness has, by every visible measure, served them across ...Read More