Given a choice, would you choose controversy?

I may be a writer, a memoirist, a blogger, even, but I'm not keen on the spotlight.  I feel more whole writing about other people's books, other people's victories, other people's big moments, than I do writing about my own.  (How not to sound smug?  How to make it clear just how grateful I genuinely am?  How to telegraph what is always true, that I recognize the transient nature not just of glory, but of life itself?)



But sometimes I'm interviewed, and sometimes I'm asked to observe, to comment on trends, to make predictions.  I love those conversations, but I don't love me afterward.  I worry that I have unduly generalized. I worry that I haven't been clear.  I worry that, in a small clip of a long interview, I may sound unlike myself who, in conversational real life, spills out into tangents, identifies the exceptions to the rules, and broadcasts not just tolerance but curiosity.  I worry about inadvertently spiking a topic with a dash of Beth controversy.  I don't wear controversy well.



Let me state for the record, in case I goof, in case I become unclear.  There is never a single best kind of book, a single best category, a single perfect specimen.  In every genre and every sub-sub-genre, arfulness can and does exist.  Do I wish that sentences—their quality, their shape—mattered more than they sometimes do?  Yes, I do.  Do I wish that millions of people were reading something other than Fifty Shades of Grey?  Yes.  Honestly.  I do.  Do I wish that I saw more people reading unexpected books on the train, on the subway, at the beach, that a greater variety of authors found their audiences, that fads didn't always rule?  I wish that, too.  Beyond that, however, I celebrate this fact: good, even great writers are at work in every genre.



The interviewee version of myself is still a work in progress.