Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Books

Ivory Tower
Skulls in the closet
What does membership in a bastion of privilege say about George W. Bush's character?
By Stephen Prothero
[01/21/00]

Book Bag
Out of this world
A pioneering playwright and director chooses five novels of panoramic scope and world-shattering perspective.
By Richard Foreman
[01/24/00]

Reviews
"Everything You Know" by Zöe Heller
In the English journalist's skillful first novel, a creep reads his dead daughter's diaries.
By John Frederick Moore
[01/24/00]

Ivory Tower
Turning Japanese
Are Japanese institutions designed to squash curiosity and spawn model citizens?
By Tom Bradley
[01/24/00]

Dear Mr. Blue
A charming manipulator
The man my friend is infatuated with propositioned me at a party. Should I warn her of his predatory ways?
By Garrison Keillor
[01/25/00]

Complete archives for Books

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

I read my husband before I met him. I read him in the local alternative weekly, where he wrote with the vocabulary and grace of an old man. I followed his career, in a vague way. When he edited an anthology of Northwest writing, I was irrationally enraged. It was the book I was born to edit, if people can be born to edit things. Never mind that I was, at the time, neither a writer nor an editor. (I was a student who spent most of her time going to rock shows.)

Eventually, I became a staff writer for the same weekly. As the courtly publisher led me through the newsroom on my first day, he paused at the paste-up table and, with a flourish of paternal pride, presented Bruce. I found myself staring into the face of ... a boy. This person whose career I cursed and envied was the exact same age as I. There was only one thing for it: Reader, I married him.

We now both make nice livings as writers. Bruce's is nicer, in size and in provenance. He has written a well-published and well-received book. I have not. He is a contributing editor at a prestigious national magazine. I am not.

The explanation seems simple: My husband is by nature a tortoise and I am a ... well, hare isn't really it. Maybe a sloth. He spent his 20s accruing experience; I spent mine accruing experiences, most of which occurred late at night in stinky bars. I dwelt in the green, oxygen-filled glade of my promise, my talent, my potential; Bruce walked the narrow streets of realized potential. He went to New York and met the right people. He mastered reporting, criticism, editing. He learned to type really, really fast. In short, he worked.

That is the reason I give for his success, when one half of my brain starts to nag at the other. But the problem with comparisons is that, taken to their logical conclusion (a bad habit of mine), they demand one entity to be, simply, better than the other. Bruce, it seems to me late at night, is more successful than I because his work is better. And -- since writing always seems to me so close to one's truest self, it would follow that his work is better because he himself is better. Nights can be hell.

Next page | Does Joan Didion's success torment John Gregory Dunne?