《The Friend》Sigrid Nunez

I left early. On my way out I heard someone say, I hope there are more people than this at my momorial.

And: Now he's officially a dead white male.

Is it true that the literary world is mined with hatred, a battlefield rimmed with snipers where jealousies and rivalries are always being played out? asked the NPR interviewer of the distinguished author. Who allowed that it was. There's a lot of envy and enmity, the author said. And he tried to explain: It's like a sinking raft that too many peopole are trying to get onto. So any push you can deliver makes the raft a little higher for you. 

If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away.

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I don't like men who leave behind them a trail of weeping women, said W.H. Auden. Who would have hated you.

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She's nineteen and a half - still young enough for "and a half" to mean something. She doesn't love you, which you can bear (which, to be honest, you even prefer). What you can't bear is that she doesn't want you. Sometimes she fakes desire, though never wholeheartedly. Mostly she is too lazy to do even that. The truth is, she doesn't care about the sex. She isn't with you for the sex. The sex that she does care about, you know perfectly well, she gets somewhere else.

By now it has become a pattern: young women who are willing to fuck you but who share none of the desire that drives you to them. What drives them instead is narcissim, the thrill of bringing an older man in a position of authority to his knees.

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Writers love quoting Milosz: When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished. 

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In a recent television documentary, a former prostitute who worked out of a suburban motel explains that Monday mornings were her busiest times: apparently nothing was so good for business as a weekend spent with the wife and kids. 

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It seemed to me that everyone I knew who was a writer - which back then meant pretty much everyone I knew - was in a state of chronic frustration. People were constantly getting worked up over who got that and who got left out and how horribly unfair the whole business was. It was very confusing. Why did it have to be like that? Why were the men all so arrogant, and why were so many of them sexual predators? why were the women all so angry and depressed? Really, it was hard not to feel sorry for everyone.