Edward St. Aubyn, author of the Patrick Melrose novels (on which the Showtime miniseries starring Benedict Cumberbatch was based), writes impeccable prose, as pared down and drily funny as Evelyn Waugh at his best, but heart-piercingly poignant in a way that Waugh rarely (never?) is. That‘s because St. Aubyn spins…

Rules for Writers: a series. Beware self-consciously clever verbs of attribution. In a widely quoted list of “10 Rules of Writing,” the crime novelist and screenwriter Elmore Leonard thundered against the use of any attributive verb other than “said” and got positively apoplectic at the use of adverbial modifiers (e.g., “he admonished gravely”). (Stephen King, who…

Rules for Writers: a series. PowerPoint and the dreaded listicle (familiar from click-bait K-holes like Thought Catalog) have given the list a bad name. …

Rules for Writers: a series. As an author who’s seen the fruit of seven years’ labor reduced to a smoking hole by a drone strike in The New York Times Book Review, I sometimes wonder why there aren’t more revenge killings by aggrieved authors. Come to think of it, I…

Rules for Writers: a series. Peter Schjeldahl (“Shell-doll”), the art critic and poet manqué whose poetic voice informed his criticism at The New Yorker and The Village Voice, died on Friday. He was 80. When Peter Schjeldahl’s doctor handed him a diagnosis, in 2019, of Stage 4 lung cancer, the…

I took magic mushrooms in hopes of curing my existential malaise. Instead, the mushroom gave me a master class in the alien strangeness of language, and how even writers are at war with words. (Part Four of a four-part essay. Part One, “The Thing in the Mirror,” is here. Part Two, “’I is an Other’: The Self is a Gothic Fiction,” is here. Part Three, “A Medicine for Melancholy,” is here.) What didn’t happen, last year, when I ingested five dried grams of Psilocybe…

The mind, as every writer knows too well, is an excellent servant but a terrible master. Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is helping sufferers from depression, anxiety, and addiction. But it also holds out hope for those of us (especially writers) haunted by the existential blues — the is-that-all-there-is? feeling that nothing means anything. (Part Three of a multi-part essay. Part Two, “’I is an Other’: The Self is a Gothic Fiction,” is here.)

Is the self a story we tell ourselves in order to tie the “bundle of partly autonomous systems” we call our minds into a coherent story? Does that mean the “I” we call “me” is nothing but an apparition in the mirror of language? (Part Two of a multi-part essay…

What Depersonalization Taught Me, at Age Three, About the Strangeness of the Self and the Weirdness of the World — and How the Pandemic Brought It All Back. (Part One of a multi-part essay.) When I was three years old, I discovered the horror of mirrors. No, that’s not quite…