Monthly Archive for April, 2011

In 1982 or maybe 1983, I published my first short story, called “The Speech of Birds.” I had been directing plays and films in the years before that, and I had been pretty successful. But my interest in this kind of creativity was a detour from writing. I had been writing, and wanted to be a writer, from a very early age.

The Literary Review paid me thirty pounds and published “The Speech of Birds.” The chasm that separated never having been in print from being in print had been crossed, at last. I had come by publication honestly. I had worked hard. I had learned things, and I had put those things into practice. My interest in writing was also honest. I was a passionate reader. Books to me were sacred objects. And when I wrote, the catastrophist in me was subdued; I was no longer wary and tense.

Continue reading ‘A life in literature, or, what you may lose by becoming a writer’

In September 1997, at the age of twenty-four, I flew to Mumbai with a box in the bottom of my rucksack containing the cremated remains of someone I had never met. Her name was Margaret. I had a passport photo of her in my wallet. It was taken during the last weeks of her final illness, which I suppose was cancer. In the photo, her hair is short and light brown, and her face, a ghostly colour, is angular and gaunt. I can see she is wearing a white sari. She smiles with a defiant blissfulness, but I sense that she is also grieving over her illness. I carried a certified letter folded up next to my passport from the crematorium in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, in case a customs official gave me any trouble. But my bag sailed through the scanners and no one said a word.

I was traveling to India to visit my father’s family and to try to see as much of the country as I could. It’s a trip I take every few years.

Continue reading ‘That time I scattered ashes in India, under the impression that life had meaning’