Middlebrow

Here’s a story.

There was this man I used to think I was in love with. He was a working artist and when we met, he expressed disdain for my career as a cog in the institutional machine. But you’re a writer, he said. Not really, I had to tell him. He clearly was not in love with me, but I thought if I became a writer, maybe he would be. I started this newsletter, which now has almost two thousand subscribers. It only made things worse. He went from contempt to jealousy. His own career, like everyone’s, had not gone exactly the way he hoped it would. The switch gave me whiplash. The thing that had seemed attainable to me, making him fall in love with me, turned out to be impossible, while the thing that had seemed incredibly difficult, gaining creative accolades, felt seamless and easy.

No one reading this will be surprised like I was. It is well known that …