Currently listening to: Sunflower by Swae Lee and Post Malone

Currently reading: Still reading Exley and Golda Meir

The next documentary I watched on the puttering habits of authors,  Philip Roth. John introduced me to Roth’s book, Portnoy’s Complaint when I was around 18, and he, my Jewish boyfriend, happily pegged me as Portnoy’s “blonde shiksa.”

I found Philip Roth to be quite different than the robust, barrel chested, John Irving, wandering around like a retired military general. The ever present man with the plan.

Roth, instead of embracing old age, has let old age happily roll around on him, like a restless sleeper on bedsheets.  His clothes loose around his body.  He limps, his back aches.  He writes standing up to stretch out his imagination and no doubt, his legs.

His writing, like Irving’s, nevertheless routine.  He has a process too.  His home also like Irving, residing in nature by a body of water.  Something about literary authors, ones who write about general life. They seem to require existing by a body of water. Much like  our craft’s  literary Abraham, Henry David Thoreau, centuries before.

Roth’s characters seem like arms that reach far beyond Roth himself. However, he has found that as he grows older, his characters grow old with him and engage no doubt in the metaphysical confusion of death that he is soon reaching.

Roth worries about suicide, having come close to it himself from tremendous back pain.  He then employs this to the business of writing and somehow connects his chronic pain to the other great writers.  Warning of writing as a somewhat dangerous business given the number of suicides.  He warns that you don’t have to look long for suffering when you are writer.  On this point, I agree with him, writing does come with suffering.

True, many authors, many artists, have been plagued by the fiery highs and bitterly cold lows of bipolar disorder, addictions, and such.  Many of them putting in their best work on their 3 or 4 night benders of no sleep and freeway minds.  I don’t know if that is Roth, however, it certainly isn’t Irving that I can tell.  And no, it isn’t me either.

But he, like Irving, still makes it look easy.  Hell, even easier.  He too gets a notion to talk to a gravedigger and just meanders down the street to talk to one.  Lo and behold there is the story. What?

And the hilarious thing is, he has all these women from young and nubile, to mature and collegiate, to hippyish, to sturdy and conservative, all singing his praises like groupies at a rock concert.

Will men do that for me when I publish?  I wonder…