I'm not sure a person ever really reveals the whole of himsels or herself to another person, and I'm not sure we should. Or rather, just because you don't, it doesn't mean you can't have a meaningful relationship with another person. It's important to remember that this idea of confessing your most shameful, embarrassing stories and self to someone else as an expression of love and intimacy is a relatively recent phenomenon, and a new definition of what it means to be close to someone. After all, the self is by its nature secretive.

When you want to be a writer, you think that actually getting published will make you feel somehow more real to yourself. But it doesn't. And nor should it. If publication is the pole around which your entire identity pivots, you're in big trouble. I'd also add that many wonderful books by brilliant authors get ignored or overlooked, and that poor sales aren't (necessarily) a measure of your abilities.

I think I'm a reporter's editor. Being a good reporter is a specific skill, one I admire and don't possess myself - I appreciate people who know how to ask the right questions, who are excellent researchers, who know how to assemble information, and I enjoy working with them to shape their information into an article. Good reporters tend to be receptive to editing, and to a more collaborative form of writing in general, and you always end up learning more from how they work than you expect you will.

I was fortunate because I had parents who believed that being a writer was a perfectly acceptable thing to want to be. They'd actually hoped that I might be an artist, and I was lucky again to grow up with people who delighted in making things: my father wove baskets and painted furniture and carved wood figures; my mother quilted and embroidered and sewed.

There are some writers who also enjoy being authors, and are good at it as well. There is nothing performative about writing, but there is about being a writer.

Witing is essentially interior work, and many writers are interior personalities. Having a job forces you out of the world of your work, and into the one in which you get to observe people. Yes, you can imagine all this, but as a fiction writer, you can never observe enough the rhythms of how humans move through the world. A job demands that you structure your time much more carefully. You learn how to be resourceful, and that in turn provides a certain intensity of focus.

There are times I wish I didn't have a job, even though I love my job: I get to work with interesting, eccentric colleagues and equally interesting and eccentric subject matter, both of which are rarities. But, naturally, I would treasure having more freedom someday: of time and of movement. Will I always have a full-time job? I don't know. But I do know that I need to spend at least part of my week in an office, with other people.