This book is so weird. It is filled with amazing writers speaking candidly and casually about one of the most potentially interesting, complex, albeit indulgent, topics I can imagine: their sense of self, oh god there’s really no other word I can use here but: vis a vis (i didn’t properly punctuate it does that help?) the public perception of “X the writer”. Is there a bifurcation (NO GOING BACK NOW) of self?- is there, can there be, a self that exists outside of the writing? Can you really put yourself, your truth, into something and then say it isn’t you? And why do we ask that of them?

A lot of it feels like a sounding board for writers to tell us about the thing they seem to be most haunted by— the reconciling of public expectation; their struggle to claim truth, even, if not utmost, in fiction but then their desire to sidestep the resultant, perhaps inevitable, drawing of conclusions about them as people, as mere mortals.

And this book, this ‘coffee table book for literary aficionados’ as it is called (::facepalm::) is occasionally, and I think most interestingly, most triumphantly and conclusively, about how we wrench out elements of our experiences— because we have to, because what else is there?—  and offer forth something that is perhaps paradoxically greater than us but that can never truly surmount, can never really approach, Being.

So maybe that is too heavy for a coffee table book (duh!). Maybe that is too ambitious a subject to ever really conquer. This tries and there are moments of profundity but it feels like a stupid waste of money, it feels like the jokes on us— perhaps because all the writers tell us, again and again, is that they will only disappoint you. They seem to be spouting back half-baked ideas, half-hearted jokes and self-deprecations— and it takes the reader awhile, after reading varyingly insulting and beautiful 500-word essays on the legacy of Borges, to realize: Oh, that’s the whole fucking point.

Don’t ask them to tell us who they are when we really came knocking to find out about ourselves.

Also: Jesus, that cover is an embarrassment.