The Story So Far...
... and where we're going next.
1.
When I was a teenager, I’d fall in love with a character from a book or an actress in a movie every other week. I was the infatuated type. It was always love at first sight after first sight after first sight…
But the first time I fell in love with somebody who fell in love back, I was a newly minted eighteen-year-old. This reciprocated passion did strange things to my sense of what I could accomplish, so one day I announced to her that I was going to be a novelist. Not wanted to be — going to be, like I was telling her that I was going for a walk, no big thing, no uncertainty.
I was going to be a novelist or nothing, and nothing wasn’t an option. I had no interest in journalism, so dry and uninspiring in the local paper and repellently “laddish” in the tabloids. I didn’t know enough about subjunctive clauses or the Affective Fallacy to write criticism. I’d concede that reviews were fine, because they might teach me how to write a good book and they could make my name faster than writing a bestseller. My first paid-for-and-published piece was a book review in a magazine that no longer exists and whose name I’ve forgotten.
If you’d asked me back then why I wanted to write novels over anything else, and if I were being honest, I’d have told you that I didn’t really know. If I were being as honest as I ever was at eighteen, I’d have given you some high-minded bullshit about the Novel as Art, about vocations and higher callings, and you’d have been right to roll your eyes. But I wouldn’t have noticed, because I knew exactly what I was going to do with my life. I had a plan.
I didn’t yet know that old saying: If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. I was an orthodox atheist, so I went and spilled my plans to everyone, and if there was any laughter, my self-seriousness drowned it out.
2.
The plan started with dropping out of art school, packing up my things, and going into the world. I got as far as Devonshire. My girlfriend wanted to find herself, which mostly meant taking mushrooms at beach parties, while I wrote a terrible first novel. It wasn’t supposed to be terrible, it just came out that way. It opened with the main character waking up, then revealing himself to be a thinly drawn self-portrait of the author, drinking too much and thinking ever such deep thoughts, and nothing else happened at all, the end.
I actually sent the thing out to publishers, including (I feel queasy admitting this) Vintage, who actually responded (a fact that swells the shame) to tell me (duh) that they don’t publish new books by first-time writers (novelist!) and certainly not without going through an agent.
This was the death of the first dream, the one where I became a breakout literary sensation whose first novel gave me the money and time to write an even more successful follow-up. I also broke up with my girlfriend, or she broke up with me, or we broke up — something broke. I moved out of the flat we shared and that she’d paid most of the rent on while I wrote that unpublishable novel. So, the first swerve in my plan: I got a day job.
Actually, I got a bunch of day jobs over the next twenty years. I worked as a carpenter, a kitchen assistant, a retail cleaner, a supermarket shelf-stocker, a handyman at a care home for people with dementia, and a supervisor on the box office of the local theatre. My longest-standing job was also easily my favourite. I was a bookseller.
At the bookshop, I learned how to talk about books, which changed how I thought about them and then how I read them. I read a lot more and I read a lot more widely, finally getting to grips with the classics and the modernists and having some fun with the postmodernists (although that soon got old; the whole “book that knows it’s a book” thing only goes so far, for me). Over the seven years I worked as a bookseller, I read my way from Austen through to Zola, from The Divine Comedy to The Human Stain. I met people who wanted to talk about books, and when they did they sounded like someone newly in love. Infatuated.
Then I met the woman who became my wife, and she believed in my dream more than I did. She convinced me to move with her to Mexico, where I wrote a second novel. It was as unpublishable as the first, but not unsalvageable, so it went into a digital drawer on my desktop. Meanwhile, my small-talk Spanish gave me a footstool to peek over the language barrier, but without my native tongue, I couldn’t have the kind of conversation about books that I wanted, needed, to have. So, the second big swerve: I started writing essays about culture. I called this project Art Of Conversation.
I spent the next seven years hating that name and throwing a ton of alphabetti spaghetti at the wall to see what kind of writing stuck. Eventually, I realised that what I loved writing about most wasn’t cinema or politics or the other stuff I dabbled in, but books and reading them. I rebranded as Volumes and told myself I’d worked out, at last and definitively, what I was doing. A brand new plan. If I’d listened closely, I might have heard God giggling.
3.
In May, I published a big essay on Anatole Broyard that took me three months to write. A neat trick: time got turned into a concertina that folded a lifetime passion into three months of research and re-reading and writing and re-writing, then collapsed it down further into 6,000 words. Maybe that trick was more impressive before we made machines that can do the same in three seconds instead of three months. Well, this wouldn’t be an article written in 2026 without a mention of AI. Here’s something that I think about AI.
I can see a near future where — at the level of you and me functioning side-by-screen with artificial intelligence, where AI is basically a new way to Google stuff — we outsource objectivity to the machine. We’ll ask ChatGPT to give us a Wikipedia-style account of a thing we’re wondering about, to be the literal view-from-nowhere. Meanwhile, we’ll increasingly want human writers to serve up subjectivity, with style and opinions and, well, the rough edges of the human mind. The follies and fallacies that move us closer to transcendent truth than facts and data can move us. The kind of thing that Alexander Sorondo (one of those writers whose humanity hums out of every sentence) described as:
“an amateur expert showing they’ve devoted three solid months to researching and writing a very long essay, with voice and craft and passion and virtually zero financial incentive, simply because they felt that seriously about the thing they wanted to say.”
That paragraph lifts the hood and points at the engine of what it was like writing the Broyard essay — the voice and craft and definitely the bottomed-out finances, even down to the three-month timetable. Passion was at the heart of it all: the passion of having lived with Kafka was the Rage for twenty years, the obsession of living with it in this close and analytical way for twelve weeks, the enthusiasm of writing something that might not be read or make me any money but that felt meaningful to be writing. I didn’t know while writing it that it would eventually be published by The Republic of Letters, but it didn’t matter. I was happy.
That happiness diminished when burnout set in. I took time off of everything, including editing the Broyard piece. Eventually, I could read some, then I could write a little, so I started work on a new Big Thing. An essay about the cartoonist Bill Watterson and how he got overwhelmed by work and by the popularity of his Calvin and Hobbes strip. Reading and writing about Watterson’s burnout became cathartic. It nurtured what needed nurturing. Which is really why I write anything and why, I suspect, people read those things. It’s got something to do with the soul, which is untouched by the wiki-style article.
That’s what helped me see that there was something missing in the first draft of the Broyard essay: my voice, which was evidence of my passion. It was in voice that the person emerged, where the facts stepped back and two humans, author and reader, could meet.
So I rewrote the whole thing and whenever I found a curtain closed between me and my reader, I loosened my grip, allowed a peek at the writer hiding in the wings. I revealed my uncertainties, confessed when I was using fiction to fill in absent facts, and a whole new subplot opened up when I realised this thing wasn’t only about Broyard’s book, it was also about my re-reading Broyard’s book. I realised that bringing myself onto the page would underline the importance of what Broyard was saying in his memoir, would show how his work had crossed time and continents to reach the reader. This reader.
There’s a story about the physicist Leo Szilard telling his friend that he’s going to start keeping a diary, not for publication but simply to “record the facts for the information of God”. His friend points out that God, being God, probably already knows the facts. “Yes,” says Szilard, “but he doesn’t know this version of the facts.”
My own reader, I believe, isn’t looking for the objectivity of an encyclopaedia summary, they’re looking for my version of the facts. They’re reading to find collective humanity revealed in a first-person point of view. They want a story that makes sense of the data, a plot that pulls events together. Some things are there to be known, others are there to be felt. If I do my job right, what you’ll read here is a little of both.
4.
There was one more draft to go. I’d put everything about Broyard’s book on the page, then stepped onto the stage to join it. The final production needed narrative shape.
So I rewrote the essay a third time, this time like I was writing a novel. I thought about scene and pacing and character, and all that stuff I’d learned from writing two novels came in useful, and I saw in a bright moment what I wanted to be doing. Turns out the reason I wanted to be a novelist, back in my piss-and-vinegar days, was because I wanted to tell stories, not relate facts. The creativity of writing was found, for me, in fitting the nuts and bolts of everyday truths into the Rube Goldberg machinery of a story.
I read someone somewhere, maybe John Pistelli on Substack or maybe someone else, use the phrase “non-fiction novella”. I liked that. I thought about the sort of thing I might write for Volumes now that I’d fallen in love with this long-form, story-like way of writing about books and their authors, and I thought I might call this “narrative non-fiction”. But maybe I won’t, because once you name a thing you have a predetermined shape that future instalments have to fit into. I’d rather keep my options open. I can hear God’s laughter now, and I think I might finally be in on the joke.
Sorondo got me here. I quite enjoyed this.
Excellent stuff.