#13 Is Status Always Accompanied by Anxiety?
I wrote a piece about status anxiety for the wonderful Australian publication Griffith Review. The quarterly review comes out in both print and digital formats - if you are not a subscriber, but enjoy book format publications packed with good writing, subscribe now! My piece (which I think is paywalled but here’s the really amazing thing the paywall enables… they PAY writers to write) is about how having one’s status as a writer elevated is almost 100% guaranteed to cause status anxiety. Plus a couple of bruising encounters I’ve had with the critic James Wood and other men from the literary manosphere.
Note that my piece contains a few mentions of Alice Munro - the print deadline was weeks prior to when the grim revelations about Munro and her second husband came to light. The best piece I’ve read about that came from American writer Brandon Taylor in his email newsletter, Sweater Weather.
Lately I’ve mainly been swimming, waiting, working, writing essays and reading short novels by Natalia Ginzburg and Mavis Gallant. Oh and this happened:
I was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature which makes me a FRSL, which my friends assure me is pronounced ‘frizzle’. So that was lovely.
I hope your northern hemisphere summers aren’t too hot and your southern hemisphere winters aren’t too chilly.