7 August 2017
A young woman in a bar asked me if my novel, which she had heard about from the bartender, was fiction or nonfiction. The awesome post-literateness of her question was picked up by most of the fiction writers I worked with as evidence of the precariousness of their place in the culture, and they hurled it back and forth as a kind of crybaby mantra. I was editing Esquire and I told them there would always be a place for fiction in the magazine, but I wondered sometimes if I was lying.
