Writer's Diary
3/11/26
Simultaneously copy-editing proofs of Stranger Beauty1, rehearsing Last of Downtown, and finishing—or trying to get close to finishing—the manuscript for Futurepast, my non-fiction book (which gathers together many of the themes from this diary in a more coherent form), all at once.
After leaving Reggio after midnight, I feel like walking. It’s warm. I’m in no rush to go home. I need to sift through the day’s work, the day’s thoughts, the day’s activities.
I’m confident that Stranger Beauty is a very, very important short novel. The Sleepers was a successful exercise, I think, in contemporary psychological realism; there’s something formalistic about it, something objective—outside of me. Stranger Beauty integrates much more of my heart and spirit, which is not, by the way, to say that it’s autofiction.
The book aims to crystallize certain thought forms that are precious to me and that, importantly, don’t have an expression except through fiction and verbal lyricism.
There’s been a lot of reasonable—and rightly demoralized—discourse about not the death, but the erasure, irrelevance, and obsolescence of the novel, arguments I fundamentally agree with—on one dialectical level; only I still believe, maybe guiltily, that there are certain things only fiction can do, and that we might need those things very soon, if we didn’t need them already. We’ll realize again the need for representation-in-depth.
My contribution to this discourse is that projection fiction—autofiction—coupled with the fetish for debut novels (which gives writers a platform before they’ve really thought things through and then rejects them, ironically, when they do, with the second and third books), selects for performance rather than crystallization, memes rather than formally complex representations.
The anxiety over the death of the American novel is anxiety over the death of the self; a novel is the outcome of having a soul and overflowing the soul—the skimmed-off brightness of the soul, the cream. The paucity, the smallness, the meagerness, the gloom, the minimal ambitions, the narcissism of my novel as well—tells us something.