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We’ve all loved terrible people. How do I know this? Because I know people, and people are terrible. Sam went to the real problem at the heart of everything: the problem of human love. The aesthetic and ethical issues presented by men from Caravaggio to Michael Jackson are a kind of parable for thi…

In other words: There is not some correct answer. You are not responsible for finding it. Your feeling of responsibility is a shibboleth, a reinforcement of your tragically limited role as a consumer. There is no authority and there should be no authority. You are off the hook. You are inconsistent…

Recovery, as a way of living, makes you see things from the monster’s point of view. You see things from his point of view because you are him. You sit in the rooms and listen and you hear terrible, terrible things, but they are also ordinary things. Because everyone in that room has been through t…

All those years I had chimed to Raymond Carver as a Pacific Northwest writer, as my Pacific Northwest writer, there was something else I recognized as well: the lost man, the drunk man. I was him. I loved him most when I was in my twenties, my party-drinking era—when once every year or so, or maybe…

However: Carver, in the grip of happiness, no longer sounded quite like that. Compare the sheer dizzying sad-sackery of “Why Don’t You Dance?” to the sense of communion that can be found in Carver’s next story collection, Cathedral. The book is still terse, still concerned with working-class people…