![]() ![]() ![]() I had promised to do an event, and the library had made space for me, and even if only one person was in the audience, I had a responsibility to deliver. But in those next two minutes-as I kept hoping for, say, a bus full of book critics to break down outside-I was thinking grim thoughts about the creative life. It was 6:58, and the reading started at 7:00.Įarlier that day, I had gotten messages from nine different friends, all saying they’d planned on attending but something had come up and they couldn’t make it. Each of their explanations was understandable-sick children, stuck at work, car troubles-but also it seemed cruel that every one of them would have an emergency on the same night. My wife was there, in the second row and I sent her a text from the front of the room: can we just leave? Will anyone notice? ![]() She was the first one to arrive at my reading at the Philadelphia Library, a week after the release of my third novel, and two weeks after the pinnacle of my writing life, when that novel was praised in both The New Yorker and The Washington Post, two articles that I had assumed would create something like buzz around me or my writing. “Nobody else is here,” the elderly woman said into her phone. ![]()
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