How Literature Saved My Life (2013) - Plot & Excerpts
Real life AT A VERY EARLY AGE I knew I wanted to be a writer. At six or seven, I wrote stories about dancing hot dogs (paging Dr. Freud …). Through high school, being a writer meant to me being a journalist, although my parents, freelance journalists, were anti-models. I saw them as “frustrated writers.” Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. They saw themselves the same way. They were always keeping the wolf from the door, if that is the expression, by writing yet another article they didn’t want to write. They worshipped “real writers,” i.e., writers who wrote books. Henry Roth. Hortense Calisher. Jerzy Kosinski. Lillian Hellman. I wanted to write books, be worshipped. Hellman’s statement to the House Un-American Activities Committee, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” was my mother’s mantra. For many years, she was the West Coast correspondent for The Nation. Draconian, omnipotent, she read a few of my early short stories, e.g., “A Few Words About a Wall,”
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