I ’ve never understood what others make out of non-fiction. Me, I used to make fiction out of it, but that was a while ago and I’m talking about regular people. I’m talking about you people, who apparently even now keep buying and library-borrowing, perhaps even reading, masses of these vast, fact-teeming books whose genre swears to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God. What exactly do you want from them? I can’t imagine you read history for the same reason I did, to cherry-pick period details to use in novels. And what about biographies? Do you read them out of curiosity, envy, jealousy? Do you read them only for comparison? That’s what I did, back when I was alive: I read other lives competitively. I read biographies as a rival. Biographies of writers especially. I read heaps of them; I read piles. Whenever I cracked a bio, I was in a contest and the only way to win was to know the stats. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Melville, Hawthorne, Faulkner: I wanted to know how old these writers were when they wrote their first books; which publishers they sold them to, and how many copies the publishers sold, and what reviews they received, and what prizes they won, and how much money the writers made. I wanted to know how long it took them to write their books; how many drafts were required; and whether they wrote them by hand or typed them up or dictated them to secretaries. And whether they slept with those secretaries, too. I wanted to know how they dealt with marriage, with divorce, with infidelity and infirmity and loss, primarily because I wanted to know how I was doing: How did I stack up? Was I ahead or behind in the rankings? In a way, it almost didn’t matter whether I was reading a biography of Henry Adams or Henry James, Sinclair Lewis or Upton Sinclair, Poe or Twain or one of the Cranes, or George or T. S. Eliot, because I was the shadow subject of them all; my life was; my choices and decisions were; by these bios, I took my measure.
Otherwise, I was a pretty normal guy. From New Jersey. Call me Phil.
Philip Roth, that is—returned from death and retirement to tell you that yes, there’s an afterlife and no, I didn’t retire; I just retired from writing novels.