What sort of a question is that?
There is a weekly feature in the Guardian Saturday Review, The books that made me ... , in which A Writer answers various book-related questions, including:
The book I wish I’d written
And that is a question that has me going 'huh?'
Because there are books that I am extremely glad are out there in the world, but I don't want to have written them myself, I want somebody else to have written them already in their particular way.
And my own feeling is much like that of Flora Poste, mutatis mutandis, when she told Mrs Smiling that when she was forty she intended to write a book as good as Persuasion.
I think it was in an essay by Ursula Le Guin, where she wrote about somebody wanting her to write a novel so that the somebody's offspring could put her name on it, and wasn't that how it was done? This is what the notion of wanting to have written somebody else's book creates in me.
I also think of novels that are blurbed as tne New or the Next Whoever...
Or do people really go around wishing they'd written Middlemarch; or, possibly, some megabucks bestseller? This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2684479.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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