Sasha Chapin refers to as ‘playing in the ruins.’ In his twenties, Chapin recalls, his definition of a successful life was that he should become a celebrated novelist, on a par with David Foster Wallace. When that didn’t happen – when his perfectionistic fantasies ran up against his real-world limitations – he found it unexpectedly liberating. The failure he’d told himself he couldn’t possibly allow to occur had, in fact, occurred, and it hadn’t destroyed him. Now he was free to be the writer he actually could be. When this sort of confrontation with limitation takes place, Chapin writes, ‘a
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