Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life wasn’t made for times like these
But it has helped me to survive them.
I’ve always known I wanted to be a writer, that I am a writer. This is a vocation without a path, a calling that, like so many, doesn’t come with more specific instructions. Like a lot of other writers, I am also a full-time something else, and the writing I do manage to accomplish often comes as the result of a delicate negotiation between all the things I have to do to keep myself alive and many of the things I enjoy doing that require significantly less brainpower than setting pen to paper.
Enter Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. I first encountered The Writing Life as an undergraduate, not as an assignment for class but as something I read (in a pirated e-book version full of typos and weird line breaks) while riding the subway to my internship at a publishing house somewhere in Midtown Manhattan, where I read all the manuscripts I should have been writing but wasn’t ready to.
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Inasmuch as the sheer beauty of her prose lit me up inside, there was also a profound unease that came along with reading Dillard. She’s an expert at poking an inquisitive finger into some of the charming little delusions I’ve set up for myself, the things that protect me from destabilizing my life.
