Today I'm 35. In 43 days, Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets will be published by Houghton Mifflin.
Don DeLillo is my favorite author. I'm never good at explaining why without sounding pedantic and hyper. Maybe it's like people who love The Grateful Dead. Hard to explain because it's the concert experience as much as, or more than, the music. For me, DeLillo writes sentences that fit neatly into neat crevices of my brain.
I do not write like him, though I admire his scope, his sentences, his sensibility.
I think of him today to help remember that there is no need to obsess over the age at which I achieved success, but simply celebrate that I did achieve it. Writing is difficult. Getting published is too. Seeing a book enter the world deserves celebration. While I once thought I could publish a novel in college or in my twenties, I followed a different course of action.
I didn't know how to write a good novel back then anyway, though I could read and analyze great ones easily.
Here's hoping my career lasts as long as DeLillo's has and that I gather up a few superfans along the way.
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| New covers for DeLillo's novels for Picador |
