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This second, English version of Class had the same structure as the first, and I don’t think I took out any scenes, but it felt very different anyway. It came out in the US and got good reviews, and Dwight Garner put it on his year-end list in the Times. I was so happy! I had lost money on this boo…

One time, I was interviewed on satellite television by a pair of good-looking 25-year-old hosts who asked me: What’s it like to have it made? Their anxious tone betrayed a lack of confidence you rarely see on TV. It was so strange to see people that young, working in broadcast media, projecting suc…

But where people could relate to Alessandro’s novel, they couldn’t relate to mine. There’s a clunkiness to my writing that comes from a loneliness so extreme it never manages to warm up. I don’t suffer like a poet, I suffer like an office clerk. The second part of the novel offered no comforting hu…

All I had were words, but I had no warmth to infuse them with. I felt I had nowhere else to go but satire. Satire shares something with empathy, but it’s a contorted relationship. Maybe they’re stepsiblings. They’re forced to live together, but satire spends all its time bullying empathy. The first…

I now saw before me the profound depth of my dissatisfaction with what the market and the publishing industry do to authors. The industry makes us forget that we got here because we couldn’t make sense of things, we couldn’t just pick up whatever shared sense of reality we were taught in school, in…