I just finished the Fall 2007 issue of The Paris Review, a magazine I’ve been reading since high school, and which I’ve been receiving ever since 1979 as part of a lifetime subscription my wife bought me that year for our anniversary. (We’ve now been married thirty-one years. Thank you for asking.)

Irene paid $100 at the time, doing so just a month before the publisher raised the price of lifetime subscriptions tenfold to $1,000. Considering that the individual issue cover price is currently $12, I’d say we came out ahead on the deal, even accounting for inflation. So much so, in fact, that George Plimpton wrote me about twenty years into the sub, asking whether I felt embarrassed about having gotten such a good bargain, and suggesting that I make an additional donation to help support the magazine.

We declined. After all, isn’t that what a lifetime subscription is all about, taking a gamble? And most of the time, the house wins. I’m sure if I’d died a year or two into the sub, I wouldn’t have gotten a refund.

I’ve always enjoyed the Paris Review interviews most of all. There are usually at least two per issue, beginning with E. M. Forster back in 1953. The Fall issue includes an interview with novelist David Grossman. I’ll profess my ignorance here by admitting that I’ve never read him before, so the fascinating things he had to say were completely new to me.

Here he talks about what it felt like to write his first piece of fiction:

“I always compare it to discovering sex. The moment before you do it, you have only a vague notion of what it will be like. It’s threatening, it’s attractive, it’s everything. The moment after, you don’t understand how you lived all your life without it. You immediately become an addict. You know that this is what you want to do.”

I don’t know that I ever considered comparing writing to sex. After all, I began to write before I’d hit puberty. Sexual metaphors weren’t yet in my toolbox. I don’t even think I had a toolbox! But the part about knowing that this is what you want to do with the rest of your life? That immediate rush was there, even though I was too young to have called it orgasmic.

And here Grossman describes what it’s like to discover one’s story:

“Miracles can happen in the writing process. More often than in life, unfortunately. Sometimes I start a novel and I think it’s the beginning, but it’s the middle of the book. One thing is clear—I never write the conclusion of a book until I am very close to the end. …

“If I know the end, the book will not surprise me, and more than that, it won’t betray me. This is important: the book should betray me, in the sense that it should take me to places I am afraid to go.”

I don’t know that I need to go to the places I am afraid to go, but I’ve always believed that I have to go to the places to which it is the most difficult to go. If I rely on the tricks and tropes that are easy for me, the work that results will be shallow and facile. I’d rather fall on my face attempting something that is difficult for me than succeed at something that is easy. How else will I ever get better? I’ve always believed in what Samuel Beckett wrote:

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Thank David Grossman for bring that quote to mind once more. And thank The Paris Review. And thank, Irene, too. Twenty-eight years later, this certainly has been the anniversary gift that keeps on giving.