What About the Baby? by Alice McDermott

Author:Alice McDermott [McDermott, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Looking back, I might advise my younger self that even having two novels-in-progress, or three or four, is no protection against those inevitable moments of abandonment and despair that strike us all in the long haul of composition. Sooner or later the brilliant idea for a novel we set out with will become insufficient to the task—not as clever as we first thought, not as thrilling in execution as it was in fantasy. We have filled pages and pages with words, but the story, or our energy, has run aground. Now what? Here’s Robinson Crusoe again:

… I began to look round me, to see what kind of place I was in, and what was next to be done; and I soon found my comforts abate, and that, in a word, I had a dreadful deliverance; for I was wet, had no clothes to shift me, nor anything either to eat or drink to comfort me … and this threw me into such terrible agonies of mind, that for a while I ran about like a madman. Night coming upon me, I began with a heavy heart to consider what would be my lot if there were any ravenous beasts in that country, as at night they always come abroad for their prey.

All the remedy that offered to my thoughts at that time was to get up into a thick bushy tree like a fir, but thorny, which grew near me, and where I resolved to sit all night, and consider the next day what death I should die, for as yet I saw no prospect of life.

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