One month

It's been a little over a month since Our Last Year came out. In that time: 

My children and wife got strep throat. 

I got the flu. 

A couple people have said some nice things about the book, but the main thing I've really heard about the book is that it's difficult. 

I don't really understand that, but okay. I mean to say: I'm surprised. But then, so many books bore me because they seem like Netflix specials. So maybe it has something to do with that. I don't know. 

I read Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney because many people urged me to. I thought it was fine. There was a lot of fingering in it for a book about adults. I also thought it was like 16 year olds dressed up in adult bodies and that's how the characters were made. I just didn't find it that interesting, though it was "compelling" in the sense that I wanted to see how many chapters were about a sexual encounter. It got a bit repetitive at about 150 pages. I can understand why people would like it, though I don't think it looks very much like life at all - it reads like a novel, meaning that the people seem to be people who you would find only in a novel. It's also political in the perfect way - everyone is a perfect liberal, with nice amounts of liberal guilt. Formally, the book felt unadventurous, and the emails seemed almost pedantic. 

I read, for research, Donald Antrim's book called Surviving Suicide, which is just a slightly lengthened version of his long article in the New Yorker of the same name. I thought that was very good - in particular, the sense that suicide is an illness itself was interesting, but even moreso, that mental illness also has a very physical component. That the person might feel sick - I've felt that before, and what he writes here rings true. It also reminds me of DFW's description where every cell feels as though it's on fire - something like that. I've read a few books about mental illness in an attempt to write the book I'm currently writing. I have no idea if I'll finish it or not. 

I've gone on trail runs, hiked. Our little boy is trying to use the potty. Our little girl was a fairy for halloween, the boy was a strawberry. I have no idea if I'll try to publish a book again. It seems like it might not be something for me, but for other people. It's easier to understand this and be okay with it on a fall day, when the trees are bright and yellow and red and orange, and the day seems more like a dream than day.