With this book project underway, I've been thinking a lot about how I write, mainly because, honestly, it’s a total mystery to me. When I was in college, I read The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro. A few sections of it were assigned as part of a class I was taking on the history of the City of New York, but when I started in on it, I couldn't stop, so I read the whole thing. The whole 1,344-page thing. (An impressive percentage of which I insisted on reading aloud to my then-boyfriend.) (He was a very good sport.) The class included an all-night bicycle ride through the city. We started in Morningside Heights and pedaled all the way down the island. I took the class in the spring semester of my senior year, just a few months after 9/11. We stopped at Ground Zero in the still-dark hours of the morning before crossing the bridge into Brooklyn at sunrise. It meant something to be reading about a previous life of the city just then. The Power Broker is a tremendous book in every respect, a biography, a portrait of a city, a study of politics and power. It’s a gorgeous, intense read, and also a fun read, and whenever I’d hoist myself up and out of those pages all I could think was how on earth does this happen? How does someone write a thing like this??
It was impossible. Except for that it wasn't, because there was the book, and there I was reading it. A miracle, then. A decade later, that answer’s still the best I've got.
Last week, Robert Caro's latest book on Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power, was nominated as a National Book Award finalist. When I saw that, I remembered a Sunday Routine column featuring Caro that ran in the The New York Times last spring. I was in the final push with my proposal then and reading it gave me a real boost. You’ll find the column right here. Also terrific is this slideshow on Caro’s writing process.
And while we’re on the topic of writers who make me cheer, take a look at this letter that Eudora Welty wrote to The New Yorker in 1933, asking for a job. It’s a gem. (Thanks to Andrew for pointing me to it.)
p.s. Did you know she was a photographer, too?