Don't write a book

... it's too scary.

[Image credit: me]

A few months after I got divorced, I started dating. Almost exclusively, I dated men who were my age, most of them successful. Like a pilot, or an attorney, or a business executive. Eventually, I noticed that several of them were telling me the same story. They’d reached some level of accomplishment — professional and financial — and they were trying to figure out what comes next. Some of them told me that after they retired, they were going to write a book. So, I’d ask them: What is your book going to be about? None of them could ever tell me the answer to that question with any kind of clarity. It was going to be about them, they’d say, or their life story, or, you know, things that had happened to them. I wondered why they thought this vague concept was book worthy. I wondered why they didn’t recognize what they were telling me wasn’t a story at all. I wondered why they thought anyone would want to read it. I didn’t think most of them would write the books they said they were going to write. I think writing a book is hard. Especially if that book is about you, or your life story, or, you know, things that have happened to you. In fact, it’s frightening. To try and locate who you are on the page. To revisit all the things you have done and which have been done to you, some of which are not very pretty. To tell the world: This is the entirety of that to which my life amounts. You want to believe there’s something more than this, but maybe there isn’t. Maybe books are just sound and fury signifying nothing, stuck between pages in books that are never written, or, if they are, are never read.

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