“I was eager . . . for a quiet, unambitious existence,” Sam Lipsyte writes. “I didn’t foresee that two events would infuse this period with an intensity I haven’t quite known since.”
During my mid-twenties, I hit what you might call a bottom. Since college, I’d partaken too liberally in wine and song, although in this case the wine was cheap beer and street drugs and the song was my self-sabotaging punk band. When the band broke apart, I cleaned up and moved back in with my mother. I got a job as a substitute teacher. One period I might be covering a history class, the next running a chemistry lab. I was grateful to the student who said, “Mr.
First came a phone call from Gordon Lish, the famous fiction editor. I’d received encouraging rejections from his magazine in college, but I’d lost my drive and nerve for writing fiction. Now I began to rediscover it, and after I sent in a new story he offered me a spot in a private seminar that some considered a cult. I had already attended twelve-step meetings and they’d helped me, so I figured there were good cults and bad cults.
So began these odd, indelibly heightened few years during which clarifying routine and caregiving replaced the ecstatic murk of earlier days. I subbed and ran errands and went to appointments with my mother. After chemotherapy, her markers would improve, decline, hint at new improvements.
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