Beautiful World, Where Are You

I mean literally, sell it for money, until I have a lot of money and no talent left. And then that’s it, I’m finished, and the next flashy twenty-five-year-old with an impending psychological collapse comes along.

At first I thought: a perfect example of our shallow self-congratulatory ‘book culture’, in which non-readers are shunned as morally inferior, and the more books you read, the better you are than everyone else. But then I thought: no, what we really have here is an example of a presumably normal and sane person whose thinking has been deranged by the concept of celebrity. An example of someone who genuinely believes that because she has seen my photograph and read my novels, she knows me personally — and in fact knows better than I do what is best for my life

At some level you want her to say, oh but Eileen, I love you very much, you’re my best friend. But the problem is that you seem to be drawn to people who aren’t very good at giving you those responses.