There’s Nothing Literary About Being Sad
It is a sorry thing, in literature, to be happy. “Happy families are all alike,” Tolstoy says, devoting his hundreds of pages to the unhappy instead. In fairy tales, the arrival of happily ever after means the story—the good part—has come to an end. “You are a happy man,” Baudelaire once wrote to a critic with whom he disagreed. “I pity you for being so easily happy. A man must fall very low indeed to believe himself happy!”
I once thought the same. As an aspiring writer, I thought happiness was not worth writing about—was not even, perhaps, worth experiencing. “I’ve never written when I was happy,” told the Paris Review in 1979. “I didn’t want to.” When I was 15 and 16 and 17, words like these stung with a sudden clarity. I’d rather be unhappy, I decided, if it meant I. Proof that I could be a writer: that my loving childhood, my general well-being, my failure to develop an eating disorder or drug addiction could yet be overcome. I was depressed—I was —and so there was hope, still, for my career. Never mind that when depressed I could barely eat or move, let alone put pen to page and urge a world forth. Never mind, I said!
