The Sequel (The Book Series, #2)

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

And she thought: If these idiots can do it, how fucking hard can it be?

happened. In general, the level of literary approbation tends to decline with the presence of an actual plot.

just woke up one morning with this idea that I could take some things that had happened in my life and make them into somebody else’s story, and then see what happened to that person.

We can howl into the wind for the rest of our lives, and there’s never going to be anyone there to answer us. But maybe that’s where the impulse to make fiction can come from. Where there’s a void of information, we can always form a narrative and make that the information, the truth.

The accusation didn’t have to be factual in order for it to be harmful.

We used to celebrate an author’s imagination when they wrote about characters very unlike themselves. Now we get upset because they’re somehow not supposed to. It does not bode well for fiction.”

“So, Leo Tolstoy doesn’t get to imagine himself into the mind of an adulterous married woman, and the rest of us don’t get to read Anna Karenina. No Madame Bovary, either. Or Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Or Isabel Archer.”

“So the book is autobiographical?” he suggested. Duh, Anna thought.

her older brother was the maypole around which the rest of their small family danced.

Self-publication had let some of the air out of the outrage balloon but created new areas of defensiveness, since what had once been unironically termed “vanity publishing” was now a hydra of undulating designations: Indie-Publishing, Hybrid-Publishing, and the at least simple-to-understand “Self-Publishing.”

the importance of regular tithing to the notion of one’s own worth.

She was, for the first time in recent memory, dumbstruck, the word itself and even the words that made up that word—“dumb” and “struck”— rattling around her head, unrestrained and unstoppable, with dumb as in stupid and dumb as in silent doing their own private shuffle around the lethal weapon of struck. She kept trying to grab onto one of them, to make them hold still, but they were like massive wriggling fish, all muscle and teeth. Over and over again until she had to let it go.