On the bookshelf opposite the bed where I normally sleep, there is a lovely limited edition copy of Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel. It was recommended to me by someone whose opinion I value highly, and the first 30 pages promise a wealth of surprising insight rendered in the kind of prose that makes me want to not only be a better writer, but a better person. In my inbox is a series of emails from Kevin consisting entirely of quotes from David Lipsky's new book "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself," a memoir about following David Foster Wallace across the country on a signing tour. Here is a sample quote, in which DFW discusses his fame from Infinite Jest:"There's an important distinction between--I've actually gotten a lot saner about this. Some of this stuff is nice. But I also realize this is a big, difficult book. Whether the book is really any good, nobody's gonna know for a couple of years. So a lot of this stuff, it's nice, I would like to get laid out of it a couple of times, which has not in fact happened. I didn't get laid on this tour. The thing about fame is interesting, although I would have liked to get laid on the tour and I did not."
I'm on a non-fiction bent lately and I've been itching to read both of those. And so of course I read something else. I don't know why. Perhaps it had to do with my insurmountable attraction to books with covers like shiny pieces of candy. I'd read the article "How To Get Divorced by 30" is based on once upon a long time ago, and it made me chuckle a little bit in the same way New Yorker cartoons sometimes do. A mental "heh heh." Like that. Apparently some enterprising editor read it too and pounced, and, unfortunately, together with the author produced this book. On the one hand, yes, I am a bitter literary agency assistant/aspiring writer with no book deal to speak of. On the other hand: there is something to be said for being semi-literate before deciding to write and publish a memoir with your actual name on it.
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