Craft of Writing I think nothing has shadowed my development as a writer more than my failure to have an interesting childhood. Most of it I spent watching TV. My family was kind of poor, but our poverty was more of a chronic than acute condition.
It was the kind of working-poor experience that leaves you with a pervasive sense of limitedness and an instinctive terror of bank tellers, but not the kind that, once survived, makes you sound badass and inspiring. As for adolescence, my main memory of it is a pervasive boredom and a sense that interesting things only happened elsewhere and to other people, that I was doomed forever to be entering rooms moments after someone had said something funny or cool, learning about a party on the following Monday, befriending a group of people only long after its best anecdotes—“Remember when we climbed on top of the middle school and the cops chased us?” “Remember when we tricked those freshmen into smoking parsley?”—were already long established. I felt about my hometown the way a person with only one book comes to feel about that book.
Maybe it’s a very large book. Maybe it’s an almanac! Still, sooner or later, its familiarity becomes more alarming than reassuring. You feel sick of knowing every paragraph, oppressed by the possibility that the world is actually small enough to fit within your head.
The sense of an unchanging everydayness was so strong that it became like a kind of depression. Looking back, I can assign ma.