A Season in Hell: October 23, 2022

Other people's books; also, how I blew my one shot with Kate Atkinson

A Season in Hell is a series of entries from my journal from 2022-23, chronicling the last few torturous months I spent working on my novel The Bright Sword—going from stuck to unstuck. If you want to take it from the top, start here.

When I’m in the weeds with a book I’m writing I cling to other people’s books. I think a lot of writers do this—anyway Zadie Smith writes about it. I can’t hear my own voice anymore, so I try to hear it in books I love. At any given moment I have half a dozen books open on my desk.

There’s something backward about using other people’s voices to figure out what your own voice is, but, well, here we are.

Currently on my desk are:

• Joe Abercrombie, The Heroes

• Daniel O’Malley, Blitz

• Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

• Lauren Groff, Matrix

• Alice Winn, In Memoriam

• Madeline Miller, Circe

• George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

• Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

• John le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

• Kate Atkinson, Life After Life, Shrines of Gaiety, various Jackson Brodie novels

• Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall etc.

The Wolf Hall books are tricky to use as a model. They’re so brilliant but their MO is so unconventional—present tense, close third person, pacing always speeding up and slowing down, braking and accelerating—Mantel is always fiddling with the throttle. She’ll spend pages on one rich tense moment, then summarize six months in the next paragraph. Maybe it’s a mistake to try to sound like Hilary Mantel when one is not Hilary Mantel.

Of them all, it’s probably Atkinson who I go to most often, who sounds the most like I want to sound.

I actually met Kate Atkinson once. She was giving a talk in Brooklyn, at a synagogue for some reason, and I groveled for and then got the plum assignment of introducing her.

We met in the green room—it wasn’t a proper green room, just a temporarily repurposed back room. She was quiet and regal and self-possessed and extremely English. What does one hope for in those moments? Atkinson doesn’t owe me or anybody anything, she’s already given us so much. I’ve had so many hours of pleasure poring over her books. They’ve made me a better writer. But selfishly I still wanted a little moment of connection, just for me.

But I flubbed it. Somehow I just could not figure out a way to steer the conversation from small talk around to anything substantive, like expressing how much I admired and was grateful to her. It was impossible.

I realize now that it was at least partly because she didn’t want it. I could see it in her eyes, that she didn’t want to be gushed at. She did not want this awkward bald American man to call her a genius, and possibly cry.