Dear Mr. Franzen,

After reading your New Yorker piece, I admit I engaged in a little wishful thinking. This article had to be bordering on fiction, with the author himself serving as the basis for a fictionalized, somewhat self-involved, late middle-aged writer’s response to a terribly painful event in his life. Dealing with a close friend’s suicide doesn’t make one less self-involved; it just colors the pain in a particular hue. So the character chooses his own means of masking the reality of what has happened — in ways that seems even worse than that reality to the rest of us. The character is smart enough to know better, but prefers his tortures comfortable, familiar. That was the only reasoning I could imagine behind publishing a piece of work that was both offensive and rambling, full of solipsism and disturbing conclusions.

Sadly, the essay adaptation of your Kenyon commencement speech in the New York Times shattered my suspension of disbelief. Let’s sum up: You can’t buy me love. Love is risky. Liking, not so much. Consumer products would make for bad, superficial people, if we suddenly made them human without giving them any actual human traits. Technology is bad because it adapts to people’s wants and needs. Bird-watching is uncool but good. You have to love something to really care about it. Life is short. (Except for the weird, sci-fi human cell-phones, I could probably have done this list entirely in pop music titles, if I gave it some time. But that would be minutes of my life I would never get back.)

This is the insight you had for graduating college students? Disneyesque comments on love, combined with a technology-is-evil rant? This speech was more self-centered and reductionist than half of the comments of Facebook. I get the impression that you’re going for an effect, but that you don’t have the feel for the difference between speaking personally and speaking narcissistically.

Please, please stop publishing essays. Go ahead and write them, if you want to take your risks and expose yourself. But when you’re done, shove them in a drawer for a year or two or ten. Read them later when you will likely cringe at the idea that you found it captivating for an audience of young adults to hear about your Blackberry love and the funny thing that happened to you. When your face will flush at the realization that “life is short — take a risk and love something” is neither original nor deep. Just because you can publish something doesn’t mean you have to.

Please just go back to writing fiction. There’s a reason we write and read fiction — as you know, given the many theories you shared in your New Yorker article. Fiction catches us off-guard; it reveals. Some great essayists can do something similar. Your essays do not.

Sincerely,
JoAnn Welsh

Writers’ group meeting is at my house tonight. I’ve promised to finish a draft of my prologue, which happens to be coyly playing hard-to-get at the moment. As the day drifts on, it will be a mad dash to the finish. Which is just fine by me, because I find it so much easier to write for real once there is something — anything — on the page. It’s like peeling a boiled egg — after the first tap and crack, the rest comes off eventually. Even if some of the shell pieces are harder than others.

I have officially taken the plunge — I’m now a full-time writer. Not only does that mean a new rarity in Starbucks visits and a lot more home cooking, it means freedom. Mental freedom, emotional freedom — and freedom from excuses. There’s no motivation quite like watching your husband patiently trying your newly developing culinary skills (due to lack of take out funding — they should have grants for that) in his commitment to your desire to write.

So while my blogging has been erratic, I’m challenging myself to write daily, both here and on Trust. There will be some other projects along the way — I’ll keep you posted.