Here is another example of how hard it is to write the personal essay. Truly, it is a formidable form.
I did enjoy this part, where he lays into the musical Rent for avoiding the inalienable fact that one of the hardest parts of being an artist is in fact paying rent. He doesn’t like any suggestion that art is glamorous:
. . . the only thing that makes you an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.
. . . . . . most folks would opt for the old fantasy of the carnal chaos of drop clothes, easels, turpentine, ratafia-wrapped Chianti bottles . . . forgetting momentarily the lack of financial security and the necessary hours and hours of solitude spent fucking up over and over again.
These essays may not be so wonderful, but he at least suffered over them. Also this I found this interesting. Not many people will admit that children can be unattractive, and certainly not themselves as children:
Tight as a watch spring, skittish as a Chihuahua, when I wasn’t bursting into tears, I covered my over-arching trepidation with a loud-mouthed bravura. I was highly unpleasant. I am not fishing here. It dawned on me recently that even though I have published books and lived through a bout of cancer, barely a handful of people from my childhood have ever attempted to contact me, and I don’t blame them one bit.
I did have to give up after a while though. Try this sentence:
The House of the Future was simultaneously sleek and voluptuous; imagine a gigantic furturistic cold-water faucet: a lovely white plus sign of a building with the mid-cetnry grace of Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal, gently inflated like a water wing.
Indeed, art is hard.