John Irving

I'm reading some John Irving and I really like it. He's very straight forward and when he uses description, he slides it on like a pair of nylons. What he writes seems very clear and the clarity makes me want to believe it to be true. Although everyone knows that artists are liars. What is there to believe? I try to find things that apply to my own life. One character in the book I'm reading is a reader. She is asked if she will become a writer and she responds 'no'. Readers preferably marry writers. Is this true, I wonder, what will define happiness in my own life?

I picked up the book because I was tired of reading the manual for my teaching job in Austria. The text is dry and very formal, heartless, and unimaginative - very discouraging. Reality is discouraging sometimes. The manual causes a familiar stir in me, something I like to call "premeditative sorrow." I'm afraid that I will be graceless and awkward in front of the kids - students being so much more receptive than I ever was to insecurity (being so insecure myself, probably). I'm afraid to be alone, bored, ill. I'm going to miss my family. I'm going to have to settle into a new place again. I'm going to miss my new found heart. It's going to be hard. But that's life.

Now I've found that it's much easier writing to someone (even if that someone is an imaginary ear on the internet) than writing from my imagination. Jenny Fields, a character from my book, says that no one is born to be anything, that success comes from hard work. I guess we will soon see.