I’m meeting friends for dinner tomorrow after the book fair and they were ready to make reservations for four until I told them Hania wasn’t coming. It would require her spending the entire day at the fair, and she finds gatherings of writers often pretentious.
I understand her. Just walking on a stage, or sitting at a dais, writers take on an air of superiority, like sages ready to enlighten the unwashed. It is the only time I feel like an imposter, looking down from my perch as the audience gathers. I know that many of them have higher IQs than I do, and often more knowledge. (Though the ones with really high IQs are probably off listening to somebody else.)
Writers by nature are riddled with self-doubt, but for many of them self-doubt vanishes when they become “authors.” Especially authors feted at a book fair and seated at a dais. When I’m in the act of writing, with all the self-doubt, I don’t question what I’m doing; I’ve been doing it so long that I now believe that it’s something (about the only thing) that I know how to do. But presenting what I’ve written, talking about it to an audience, is very different. I like what Kafka said: Before the work, the writer doesn’t exist. After the work, the writer is no longer there.
