A Preparation for Death

Начало книги

In August 2007, I found myself alone in a house I did not want in one of the bland boomtime estates of north Dublin. My marriage had ended. This book is mostly the story of what came after. I shall try to explain a few things, here, about what came before.

I arrived in Ireland in 2003. I’d been living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the few years previous to that, writing a novel. When the book failed to sell, I decided to leave the US for Europe: I could not bear the humiliation of being an unpublished novelist in a country where bad writing, as it seemed to me, had become institutionalized. I resented everyone I knew — for their success, which I considered fraudulent, or for their stupidity, which I considered implacable.

In Dublin, I was unemployed for seven months. During this period I revised the novel. I walked from the house I was sharing to a shopping centre down the road, where there was a small café that was never crowded. I plugged in my laptop and worked. I remember very little specifically about this time. I only remember that on the day I finished the revisions, I felt happy. The book had doubled in size, but I had, inarguably, dealt with every criticism it had received. It now answered everyone’s concerns. When I went up to pay, I informed the owner that I’d been working on my novel, and was finished, and I wanted to thank him personally for giving me the space. In front of other patrons, he screamed at me for using up his electricity without permission, and only drinking coffee when everyone else ate. He told me never to come back. It was not too long after this that I realized the revision of that novel had been a waste of time: all I had done was glue, clumsily, a great deal of conventionality around a book I believed was original.

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