Gay Talese

I’m doing a workshop this week with legendary journalist Gay Talese. The publicity all over campus calls him quote: “the most important writer of his generation.” (But that quote is never attributed. Doesn’t it matter who said it? What if it was his mom? But I digress. At any rate, he’s a big deal.) I read my article out loud. We were only supposed to read the first 4 pages, but he kept prompting me to keep going until I’d read the entire thing. He said, “Wow. That was great. I wanted you to keep going because I was sure you were going to crash and burn sooner or later, but you didn’t. This is publishable.” I felt pretty pleased, since that’s really the first nonfiction piece I’ve written. And just to show that he really knows what he’s talking about, he also said that I was obviously “unbalanced” and “a dingbat.” And that’s just from reading my 12-page article that’s not even really about me. Now that’s insight.

Though he did seem to be under the impression that I’m an aspiring comedian aiming to do radio humor or something like that. I didn’t get a chance to explain that I mostly write morbid, surreal short fiction. That has me thinking though. If other people’s reactions are any indiction, somehow in the last five years or so I seem to have become funny. I don’t know how this happened. I never thought of myself as a particularly funny person. It’s occurred to me that my fiction mostly reflects an older worldview of mine — that of a sensitive, intense, and powerless loner. That’s not really who I am anymore. Now I’m a lot more social, easygoing, and confident. (Though ladies, I am still extremely sensitive.) I’ve been wrestling lately with whether my fiction should be doing more to reflect that shift of worldview.