Which, thank God, because I don’t have health insurance. I do this because it’s the one profession, in my case, that doubles as an antidepressant. Why else would I choose writing as a job? Not for the money or the imminent danger of offending someone on Twitter and immolating my whole career in ten seconds. I wasn’t articulating these thoughts at age eight or whatever, but they penetrated. They turned an ugly condition into art-and wit! And beauty! The moment you discover that a bad thing can be redeemed by creative human intervention is the day you unlock the reason, or a reason, to keep existing. That must be why I remember the Steig books that rhymed with my tantrums. Steig had a Dickens-level command of childhood misery, depicting it as an endless tunnel of denials and supervision. If you were a fan of the man’s work as a child, you may have been attracted by the verbal shenanigans, the breadth of subject matter (he wrote about dentists and talking bones), the mammalian heroes, or, perhaps, the streak of subtextual misery. That’s the man in a nutshell: hellfire fury and imaginative splendor. When he had trouble sleeping, he envisioned himself the owner of a magic long-range dart that he could use to destroy enemies. He regarded his education as “defective.” And his book titles, sheesh: The Lonely Ones, All Embarrassed, The Agony in the Kindergarten, Rotten Island, Our Miserable Life, and The Rejected Lovers, to name a few. He considered despair the human condition. For someone who wrote children’s books, William Steig was as adult as they come.
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