Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky Page A

ability to do triage and tree-diagrams resonated with people’s own existence in life. That I think a
lot
of people feel—not overwhelmed by the amount of stuff they have to do. But overwhelmed by the number of choices they have, and by the number of discrete, different things that come at them. And the number of small … that since they’re part of numerous systems, the number of small insistent tugs on them, from a number of different systems and directions. Whether that’s qualitatively different than the way life was for let’s say our parents or our grandparents, I’m not sure. But I sorta think so. At least in some—in terms of the way it feels on your nerve endings.
    “Information sickness,” as in Ted Mooney’s book
.
    Now we’re into DeLillo-ville, right? Where the bigger the system gets, the more interference there is, and all that. I’m not talking about the system, I’m talking about what it feels like to be
alive
. And how formal and structural stuff in avant-garde things I think can
vibrate
, can represent on a page, what it feels like to be alive right now. But that’s only one of the things fiction’s doing. I’m not saying it’s the only thing. I’m working hard here to try to make sense of what it is I’m saying to you. If your life makes linear sense to you, then you’re either very strange, or you might be just a neurologically healthy person—who’s automatically able to decoct, organize, do triage on the amount of stuff that’s coming at you all the time.
    You were getting this across in the book?
    I don’t know. I can tell you that’s part of it. I mean, the book’s structured a little strange, and that’s part of it. The scary thing about doing it was, structuring it that way puts a lot of demands on the reader. Is there gonna be a payoff? Is the reader gonna
feel
there’s a payoff? Is the reader gonna throw the book at the wall? You know? I don’t know. This stuff is tremendously—I get all excited and frustrated talkin’ about it.
    You can put the pieces together. But it requires a certain amount of—what’s the word—prestidigitation to do it. Which I would think you would find annoying.
    Like if I could articulate it, then there wouldn’t be any need to make up stories about it, you know? And I always think that, until the person comes, and then I always like the person, I want to impress them, and then I sort of
try
to articulate to them. (Defeated) And I guess maybe I’m learning that I just can’t anymore.
    So many thoughts whirling around at any one time, that’s what it would really feel like to be in here. It’s a nice performance—it’s nice up there on the stage. But it’s not what it feels like to be in
here
. Does that make any sense to you?
    More?
    What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit—to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves be excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we’re mostly aware of only on a certain level. And that if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff that the reader’s been aware of all the time. And it’s not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person. [James Brown: “I Feel
Good”
in background, on the restaurant sound system.] It’s that the writer is willing I think to cut off, cut himself off from certain stuff, and develop … and just, and
think
really hard. Which not everybody has the luxury to do.
    But I gotta tell you, I just think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer. Because that means I’m going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to have a conversation with a person.
    And if you think that’s faux, then you think what you want. But I, um … what I’ve