The Road

I started my day by crying over the end of The Road. I tried to finish it last night, but fell asleep with about 40 pages left. Eric was right. It's amazing. I won't do any kind of mini-review, because I'm sure that there are many already out there, but will say that McCarthy is so good at the fragment sentence, at the occasional philosophical observation, at layering simple images to make something more complex, that every writer, regardless of genre, should read this book over and over.

What I'm thinking about this morning, though, is the toll writing a book like this must have on the author. There's been a lot of talk lately about how troubled Heath Ledger was before his death because of the difficult role of the Joker, and I think that writers must go through a similar process when working on an emotionally difficult or intense project. I don't know about you, but for me to recreate an emotion with any kind of accuracy, I have to force myself to feel that emotion. That's one of the many reasons I've turned to poetry in the last few years--the format allows me to capture what I need to capture without wallowing for too long in something ugly.

This is also one of the reasons I'm hesitant to start working on this nonfiction project I've got rolling around in my head. It's about me, my mother, my family, and the events leading up to my mother's lung transplant. It's about the greatest fear and the greatest sadness I've ever felt, but also about hope and faith. To really get it on paper, I have to go back to a version of myself that I'm very happy to have left behind. Can I go there without getting stuck?

So I wonder--are there writers who can deal with bad feelings without feeling bad feelings? Have I just not learned the art of detachment? Or is this part of being an "Artist"--that stereotypical narcissistic persona who must suffer in order to create?