Leonardo Cendamo/Getty

Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.

One summer after college, I decided to learn how to write—and, more importantly, to read.

I was around 21. I had read almost no books in my life. And, so, I spent a summer basically alone—applying for jobs, doing some data entry for money—and following the routine I’d read that Don DeLillo kind of half-way does.

“I work in the morning at a manual typewriter. I do about four hours and then go running,” he said in a Paris Review interview. “This helps me shake off one world and enter another. Trees, birds, drizzle—it’s a nice kind of interlude. Then I work again, later afternoon, for two or three hours.”

I tried that. All of that writing time was too much for me. I’d have nothing to say if I wrote for seven hours a day. But, still, I woke up early, wrote for as long as I could, ran, and then read. Usually, by 10 in the morning, I was bored. 

Still, it was approachable. For how high-flung DeLillo can seem, it has always been easy to walk up to his view of life: He likes baseball, he likes reading, he likes running, he feels like we’re all trapped in a paranoid nightmare, and he has a compulsion to trace it back to the Kennedy assassination.

His newest book hits the same tone, from the sound of it in the review. He has a nice interview in the New York Times too, which I found charming and human—still glinting with that metallic, cold DeLillo edge.

Sometimes—or should I say in that horrific phrase that indicates these plague years, “in this time”—it can help to return to the things that we know we enjoy.

Whether reading DeLillo has helped me write is up for debate (please inquire with my editors, who have seen my gangly sentences and personal dictums about how grammar functions, including a first pass of this sentence, which started, “How reading DeLillo has turned out to learn how to write…”). But he certainly taught me, in his writing, not to fear the simplicity of American life, and not to fear aspiring to make it higher art. Just look at his writings on baseball. Or that opening sentence, added to his novella Pafko at the Wall when it became the introduction to Underworld: “He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.”

BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things they don’t like—which is most things that are true.

No one gets to tell Mother Jones what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things they don’t like—which is most things that are true.

No one gets to tell Mother Jones what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate