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ARE NOVELS ‘DOOMED’?
Why Rules About Writing Are Like Rules About Sex
15 frame-worthy answers to writers’ questions — about discipline, bad reviews, and more — from a world-class novelist and his famous friends
The more memoirs I read by living authors, the more I like dead ones.
Books about long-gone writers put your own trials in context: Think of Shakespeare and Jane Austen sharpening the nibs of their quill pens. And social media has put a terrible crimp in the ability of living writers to speak freely. Nobody wants to get trolled for an offhand comment, and every author I know is self-censoring in some way.
Amid all of it, my favorite spot at my library has become a beige rolling cart near the entrance. That’s where the staff puts out books withdrawn from circulation and free to all takers. Nobody seems to want some of those discards except for me. I love them.
A case in point is a recent find: a memoir of the late Somerset Maugham, whose novel The Razor’s Edge I’ve long admired. I knew I’d hit a literary trifecta when I saw amid the librarians’ giveaways a copy of Garson Kanin’s Remembering Mr. Maugham (Atheneum, 1966).
