Dorothy and Vincent

I hope you see that this is not an essay about holding on to your dreams or the importance of dusting yourself off every time you get knocked down. You’ll do that anyway. We all do. We’re not so easily defeated or felled. We have extraordinary pain thresholds, remarkable degrees of fortitude and endurance. What I am conveying is this: if you don’t remember to take full responsibility for your failures, to understand how inextricably interlocked they are with your successes, then you will never authentically succeed.

Adam Ross, In Praise of Failure

Like a lot of young writers, when I started out, I had a dim conception of my material. I wrote about people and places that were vastly separated from those I knew. Then, too, if I tried to write about my own self, the results were far from illuminating, for the simple reason that I didn’t understand myself too well. As soon as I began writing The Virgin Suicides, however, I suddenly realized that I knew a lot, not about my own psychological dimensions so much but about the town where I grew up. I knew everything about the people who lived on our old street. I remembered their oddities and family histories, the rumors and gossip, and I remembered the weather, the local legends, the racial tensions, the flora and fauna. I stopped being embarrassed about being from a suburb in the Midwest. I treated it like my own Yoknapatawpha County and, for the first time, produced something that interested adult readers.

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Paris Review