When two writers meet, and fall in love, and break up, and then begin to write, is this competition impossible to avoid
Photo: Underwood & Underwood/Corbis More than five years had passed since Sam and I had last seen each other when he sent me an email with the subject line: “IMPORTANT.” The email was sent to my work address. It was terse but portentous. “You might be in a position to help me,” he wrote, “so I’m sending you this.” Attached to the email was a manuscript. A novel.
But there was horror mixed with the honor. I’d never asked myself: Bellow or Roth, Hemingway or Fitzgerald, Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky? It seemed too terrifying to be made three-dimensional — to be faced with someone else’s portrait of your psyche. If the depiction seems to miss the mark, but includes just enough to make you recognizable, then you’d have to wage an endless personal PR campaign with anyone who came in contact with the text: No, reader, you don’t know me.
The novel wasn’t even the first time Sam had made me into material. When he returned to school a few semesters later, we took a creative-writing class together. We fought over what he could and could not write about; I made him change the details of some of his stories so that I could sit through class without passing out. I wasn’t entirely prudish about privacy, however. Sam published some stories in a campus magazine that made me feel proud rather than violated.
After several years, I got engaged and, not knowing where to find him, left a message on the voicemail of the last phone number I had for him. I felt like I was throwing pebbles into a black hole; the communication had no tail. I never heard back. This is how it ends, I thought. There was no way, however, that I could help him with his second request. Promoting the book would seem underhandedly conceited, as well as just bizarre. And I wasn’t sure that the novel was good enough to overwhelm my hesitations; I was pretty sure that it was impossible for me to judge. In the end, I gave him some names of people he might contact but made no invitation to use mine.About a month after I sent him my notes, he texted me to say he would be visiting Washington, where I still lived.
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