…is the theme, it seems, of Cristina Nehring’s A Vindication of Love, which Katie Roiphe calls “an ardent polemic” championing the not-wisely-but-too-well school of love, and positing that ferocity and passion, even if impermanent, trump dull contentment pretty much every time.

If you fit that template to the business of fiction, I agree 150%. (We’ll keep my personal life out of this, shall we? I’m kinda boring.) Writing something because it’s seized you, because it woos you, freaks you out, pushes you past all limits, sends you sneaking downstairs at night to just review the pages one more time … that’s fun, that’s serious play.  Writing something because it seems like a good idea for a novel and you’re sure it will sell – um, not so much.

(Double ditto for actually reading the books: Whose book club do you want to belong to, the one where it’s all chitchat and chardonnay, or the one where people yell I hated this book! I loved this book! at each other?  We won’t even get into individual titles, but let’s call one, I dunno, Chelsea, and one Balzac….OK, that’s unfair.  But so what?)

And what’s a talent for, anyway? whether it’s to write books or commit pure math or whatever one’s calling may be?  Is it to make a nice living, take vacations and buy cashmere socks?  Or to leap off invisible cliffs, bang your head against walls, be ambushed by joy? A self-animating puppet is a bore.  Go where the strings tug you. Let’s have some fun.