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The Official Website for the author Stephen King.

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“I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.”

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Before your Uncle Charlie went away to Vancouver, we told the stories our dad told us when we were just kids on Christmas Eve, a bottle of sheltzer water between us because he had long been sober. The kind of stories with the monsters outside paper-thin trailer walls, and the bloody brides that followed your car home at night around each curve of the road. The kind of stories that convinced us something was out there, just under the surface of the night, clawing at the cover of the darkness to get to us.

Dad's rhetoric to remind us what wanted to hurt us, to keep us in our beds at night, shivering together like rabbits about to be strung upside down by the legs, their spines severed in half.

"Then what happened?" Your Uncle would say and his voice, always diplomatic, always demanding, would be the largest it's ever been. He had been no more than eight.

A tawny-headed boy with a gape tooth who thought the surface of a lake was clear enough to look into and see himself. Like the compact mirror in our mothers' purse. Once he flooded the sink to get the same effect, but the water that came through the pipes to our old two story looked like it had been swirled with cream, opaque and he had to drain the water disappointed.

Dad would clear his throat to give Charlie an alternate ending, one in which our antagonist, the man who ran over the young woman with his car was able to have a family and relieve his guilt in church to God. Satisfied, Charlie would lean back to press his shoulders squarely into the car cushions of the backseat with a smirk that strung up his face in a weird way, like he didn't know it was even there. I remember the lights of the freeway overheads, streaking across his expression and dividing into visible parts.

"He dies under that car in the snow. He freezes to death, Charlie. He kills that woman when he hits her and takes her glasses, bloody but the lens still in tact in their bent frames," I recited, even as Charlie's fist met my stomach, finding the tenderness there and pressing it back into my spine, "Years later, the biggest blizzard ever hits Syracuse, and he has to stop to change his tire or else he'll have to wait it out and he is in a hurry to get to the bar. Wait it out? Not when the game was on."

Charlie wailed and wailed and wailed that time, like his screeches would make me stop, but his voice had long been something long transformed into white noise. At that age, it was duty of the oldest sibling to enact terror, no matter the circumstances From the drivers' seat, dad's hand reaches back to nab the edge of my shirt, tugging fiercely to close my mouth, but halfway through a story and I couldn't stop. "He left the glasses on the dashboard to remind him of what he had done and just as he is nearly done with the tire, truck weighs down unbelievably too heavy on the jack, unstable on the ice. The truck lands on top of him." I smack my palms together loud in Charlie's face, who has the mind enough to bite down on my hand, dangled in front of him like thanksgiving turkey to a frenzied rottweiler.

I often wondered that if Charlie had the intention, if he could to unhinge his jaw and eat me like a snake, cracking my bones on the way down and my knees protruding in his chest cavity.

As I wrenched my hand from his mouth, I finished, "It severs him into two and as he waits for his upper half to freeze, he sees a glint of glasses lens in the snow ahead, suspended on a body, watching and waiting."

Charlie had dissolved into even and slow sobs, the kind dedicated to crocodile tears and he shakes his head soft, as Dad dictated the punishment, cutting through the relative silence I'd blanketed the car in.

When he finished, Charlie had found his simper again, and in a even tone, the kind that didn't waver he told me, "I will kill you someday." It was something he said to me often, especially after Dad's stories and after I ruined something he loved.

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I think this is interesting primarily because it discusses the dialogue we share with others as a form of rhetoric.

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I can't call myself the most dedicated writer. I write a few hours a day and call it good. A writer in my program bleeds unto the page and calls it great. Yet, here in the mornings, in this Aspen house with a furnace and a yellow doormat, I can find a peace in it that doesn't require my dedication or commitment. It requires my heart.

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Central issue: “technique of non-didactic fiction, viewed as the art of communicating with readers – the rhetorical resources available to the writer of epic, novel, or short story as he tries, consciously or unconsciously, to impose his fictional world upon the reader” (WCB, p. xiii).

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joachimvlieghe: Summarizing notes on 'The Rhetoric of Fiction' - Wayne C. Booth ***These summarizing notes are based on a summary found at: http://www.rlwclarke.net/ and represent a reorganized schematic version of the original material.

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And if you open any edition of Carrie, you’ll read the same dedication: “This is for Tabby, who got me into it—and then bailed me out of it.”

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On Genre vs. Literary

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When Matthew Arnold keeled over, in April, 1888, while hurrying to catch the Liverpool tram, Walt Whitman managed to contain his grief. "He will not be missed," Whitman told a friend. Arnold reaffirmed all that was "rich, hefted, lousy, reeking with delicacy, refinement, elegance, prettiness, propriety, criticism, analysis." He was, in short, "one of the dudes of literature." Whitman probably figured that his own gnarly hirsuteness would save him from becoming a dude. He was wrong, and therein lies a lesson for all hardworking scribblers: stick around long enough, develop a cult following, gain the approval of one or two literary dudes (in Whitman's case: Henry James, Ezra Pound, and F. O. Matthiessen), and you, too, can become respectable.

Of course, it's one thing for a poet who contains multitudes to become a literary dude; it's another for writers who deal with lawmen, criminals, private detectives, spies, aliens, ghosts, fallen heroines, and killer cars. Such writers-commercial and genre novelists-aim at delivering less rarefied pleasures. And part of the pleasure we derive from them is the knowledge that we could be reading something better, something that, in the words of Arnold, reflects "the best that has been thought and said in this world."

For the longest time, there was little ambiguity between literary fiction and genre fiction: one was good for you, one simply tasted good. You could either go to an amusement park or trundle off to a museum, ride a roller coaster or stroll among the Flemish Masters. Genre writers were not exactly unmindful of this. In 1901, G. K. Chesterton, the creator of the plump, priestly sleuth Father Brown, lamented, "Many people do not realize that there is such a thing as a good detective story; it is to them like speaking of a good devil."

But good devils make for good company, and, in time, bookish people did begin to speak of them. In 1929, the eminent Milton scholar Marjorie Nicolson, the first female president of Phi Beta Kappa, described a dinner party rescued from the brink of dullness when the desperate hostess asked a distinguished scholar to name "the most significant book of recent years." The great man replied, "I never can make up my mind between 'The Bellamy Trial' and 'The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.' " That, you can imagine, got the room buzzing.

Nicolson's point was not that Agatha Christie is better than George Eliot but that readers who seek out mystery novels are looking to escape not from life but from literature, from the "pluperfect tenses of the psychical novel." Nicolson was speaking on behalf of those intellectuals who, "weary unto death of introspective and psychological literature," simply yearned for a good story. Edmund Wilson, however, didn't buy it. He was irritated by the giddy approval of highbrows like Nicolson, and, in 1944, published an article in this magazine that contained some disparaging remarks about the mystery genre. To Wilson's surprise, he received more passionate letters than his criticisms of the Soviet Union ever elicited-so many, in fact, that he felt compelled to revisit the case a few months later.

The result was "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?," which dispatched the genre's big guns with seignorial aplomb: Dorothy Sayers's "The Nine Tailors" was "one of the dullest books I have ever encountered in any field"; Margery Allingham's "Flowers for the Judge" was "completely unreadable." Reading mysteries, Wilson concluded, "is a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking." He admitted that John Dickson Carr had a descriptive gift and that Raymond Chandler wrote well, though he remained "a long way below Graham Greene." Chandler wasn't pleased. "Literature is bunk," he retorted, propagated by "fancy boys, clever-clever darlings, stream-of-consciousness ladies and gents, and editorial novelists"-in other words, a bunch of literary dudes.

Nonetheless, it was a senior literary dude, W. H. Auden, who pointed Chandler canonward. In "The Guilty Vicarage," his sin-soaked defense of the detective story, Auden decided that Chandler's "powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art." Although properly gratified by Auden's estimation, Chandler protested that he didn't know what to make of it. He had studied the classics at the Dulwich College preparatory school, in London, and regarded himself as "just a fellow who jacked up a few pulp novelettes into book form."

For all that, it was Chandler's blend of stylish wit and tough-guy sentimentality that made it easier for the commercial writers who followed. If you were good-maybe not Chandler good, but good enough-you could find a booster among the literati. In 1965, Kingsley Amis compiled his "James Bond Dossier," and six years later Eudora Welty gushed over Ross Macdonald's "Underground Man" on the front page of the Times Book Review. In 1989, fans of Robert B. Parker's Spenser books were treated to a laudatory piece in the Book Review by the esteemed critic and biographer R. W. B. Lewis, and, more recently, the Times ran a feature on Lee Child. Indeed, scores of novelists in a variety of genres-P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, John le Carré, Donald Westlake, Charles McCarry, Henning Mankell, Dennis Lehane-routinely receive glowing writeups in major newspapers and literary venues.

The doyen of thriller writers, however, continues to be the Detroit-based novelist Elmore Leonard. Leonard began publishing in the nineteen-fifties and since then has produced at least one novel every two years. Hollywood discovered him before the book critics did ("3:10 to Yuma," "Hombre," and "Valdez Is Coming" were all adapted for the screen), but in short order Leonard's cut-to-the-chase dialogue, intelligently spare narrative, tight-lipped heroes, and offbeat villains had reviewers tripping over their own superlatives. In 1995, Martin Amis dubbed him "a literary genius who writes re-readable thrillers," and who "possesses gifts-of ear and eye, of timing and phrasing-that even the most indolent and snobbish masters of the mainstream must vigorously covet." It seems we have reached a point when Robert Graves's words about Shakespeare can be applied to Leonard: the remarkable thing about him is that he is "really very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good." Does this sound like a guilty pleasure?

Praise can be seductive, and writers who ordinarily would not reach for literary laurels may start hankering after them. But if a writer of a romance or a mystery succeeds in deepening her narrative does the guilt disengage from the pleasure, and is the pleasure any the less for it? Writers like P. D. James pride themselves on rejecting the very conventions of detective fiction that appealed to Marjorie Nicolson. In 1981, James enlisted the Times Literary Supplement to make her case: "The modern detective story has moved away from the earlier crudities and simplicities. Crime writers are as concerned as are other novelists with psychological truth and the moral ambiguities of human action." James's point is well taken, but for many genre practitioners there is a danger in earnestness. Nothing bogs down a pulpy tale faster than real-life feelings about real life. The weakest parts of Robert Parker's violent but often charming Spenser novels are the soul-searching conversations between the detective and his shrink girlfriend Susan Silverman. The dialogue makes your head explode, and not in a good way.

Skilled genre writers know that a certain level of artificiality must prevail, lest the reasons we turn to their books evaporate. It's plot we want and plenty of it. Heroes should go up against villains (sympathetic or hateful); love should, if possible, win out; and a satisfying sense of closure and comeuppance should top off the experience. Basically, a guilty pleasure is a fix in the form of a story, a narrative cocktail that helps us temporarily forget the narratives of our own humdrum lives. And, for not a few readers, there's the additional kick of feeling that they're getting away with something. Instead of milking the cows or reading the Meno, they're dallying somewhere with "Fifty Shades of Grey."

So, despite the best efforts of literary theorists, the concept of guilty pleasures, although wobbly, seems to be holding firm. NPR currently airs a "My Guilty Pleasure" segment, where "writers talk about the books they love but are embarrassed to be seen reading," and where the novelist Gary Shteyngart turned up one day to riff on the post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel "Zardoz." Although he admitted that he couldn't quote a single sentence from Jane Austen, he managed to rattle off lines from "Zardoz," such as "Stay close to me, inside my aura."

Probably a few well-respected writers can recite passages from genre novels, and some may recognize the following:

I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale. . . .

I do not say the story is true, for I did not witness the happenings which it portrays, but the fact that in the telling of it to you I have taken fictitious names for the principal characters quite sufficiently evidences the sincerity of my own belief that it MAY be true.

It's a pretty good story, too, about an infant raised by gorillas: a big guy, six feet three, two hundred and forty pounds, knows how to handle a knife-maybe you've heard of him? He was created in 1912 and appeared in twenty-five sequels, twelve or thirteen of which I read when I was around twelve or thirteen. Had I been any older, I think I would have known that this is writing as a form of silent-film acting, no more believable than the conspiratorial smiles and exaggerated frowns of hammy vaudevillians. The passage I've cited is the opening of Edgar Rice Burroughs's "Tarzan of the Apes," whose centennial is being commemorated by the Library of America's publication, this year, of the original pulp novel.

The All-Story, the magazine in which Burroughs's novel first appeared, was called a pulp not because it was citrusy but because it was printed on cheap, untrimmed wood paper. But, if you wanted juicy, that's where you headed, because that's where many genre writers earned their bona fides. Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, David Goodis, H. P. Lovecraft, and Philip K. Dick wrote for the pulps, and all, not coincidentally, have been ordained by the Library of America. One hardly requires more proof of the insidious plot: writers we once thought of as guilty pleasures are being granted literary status. The man whom Rudyard Kipling (hey, didn't he also write about some kid in the jungle?) accused of having published a book so that he could "find out how bad a book he could write and get away with it" is now a literary dude. Despite the turgid prose, the wooden dialogue, and the fact that the apes exhibit more complexity than the humans, the Tarzan novels have become a solemn cultural fixation. "Tarzan of the Apes" is both "prelapsarian fantasy in its conceit and Emersonian fable in its reach," Gerald Early confidently asserts in "A New Literary History of America." Not only that, but the "Tarzan story of man in a state of nature leads to a kingdom no less powerful than that of Milton's 'Paradise Lost.' " Evidently, one man's Cheetah is another man's Satan.

The guilty-pleasure label peels off more easily if we recall that the novel itself was once something of a guilty pleasure. In the mid-eighteenth century, there was a hovering suspicion that novels were for people not really serious about literature. Instead of laboring over "An Essay on Man" or some musty verse drama, readers could turn the pages of an amusing French novel or even one by Richardson or Fielding. Unlike works of moral or religious instruction, novels were diverting. Of course, if they proved too diverting, how good could they be? Hence Dickens, with his enormous audience, was considered by many of his contemporaries to be more of a sentimentalist and a caricaturist than a serious artist.

Modernism, of course, confirmed the idea of the commercial novel as a guilty pleasure by making the literary novel tough sledding. Far from delivering easy pleasures, modernist fiction could be an exercise in aesthetic and psychological subtlety; it was written not for people with time on their hands but for those willing to put in the time to master it. Indeed, fiction in the age of modernism became as much identified with literature as poetry or plays, and its complexities required a new class of expert readers, a secular clergy capable of explaining its mysteries. Serious fiction was serious business, and a reader might tire of it.

George Orwell was such a reader. His essay "Good Bad Books," which takes its title from a coinage by Chesterton, is his apologia for admiring "the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished." Orwell had two kinds of good bad books in mind: the first consisted of "escape" literature," having nothing to do "with real life"; the second, although concerned with real life, was "quite impossible to call 'good' by any strictly literary standard" and proved "that intellectual refinement can be a disadvantage to a story-teller, as it would be to a music-hall comedian." Orwell admits to enjoying Sherlock Holmes, Raffles, and "Dracula," but can't take them seriously. He seems positively heartened by the thought that such books remind us "that art is not the same thing as cerebration," that, in effect, intelligence could be a hindrance to writing fiction; otherwise, every intelligent critic would be capable of writing a readable novel.

Today, the literary climate has changed: the canon has been impeached, formerly neglected writers have been saluted, and the presumed superiority of one type of book over another no longer passes unquestioned. So when Terrence Rafferty, in the Times Book Review last year, expressed disappointment with a novel that tried and failed to transcend the limitations of its genre he caught some flak.

For Rafferty, the book demonstrated the difficulty of finding "an expressive equilibrium between 'literary' fiction and genre fiction." Literary fiction, he went on to say, "allows itself to dawdle, to linger on stray beauties even at the risk of losing its way." That was enough to rankle Ursula K. Le Guin: "The distinction Mr. Rafferty makes between literary and genre fiction, though cherished by many critics and teachers, was never very useful and is by now worse than useless." The presumed dichotomy also irks Lee Child, the author of a popular series of books featuring the ex-military policeman Jack Reacher. Child is indignant that thrillers might be considered peripheral to literature. "The thriller concept is why humans invented storytelling, thousands of years ago," he told an interviewer. "It's the only real genre, and all the other stuff has grown on the side of it like barnacles." And-who knows?-Trollope might have ceded him the point. A writer who can deal with murder, barbarity, and horror-with "tragic elements"-is, Trollope argued, "a greater artist and reaches a higher aim than the writer whose efforts never carry him above the mild walks of everyday life."

But, as is often the case with efforts to recognize and raise up the formerly downtrodden, a spirit of revision can lead to overvaluation. Yes, there's something to be said for John D. MacDonald's 1960 noirish thriller "The End of the Night," but one has to wonder at the lavish generosity that led Stephen King to proclaim it among "the greatest American novels of the twentieth century," one that "ranks with 'An American Tragedy.' "

King doesn't want to be a guilty pleasure. Having mastered the horror genre, he started contributing, in the nineteen-nineties, to small prestige journals like Antaeus, and in 1996 he received an O. Henry Award for a story published in this magazine. In 2003, the National Book Foundation awarded him its medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. At that point, King had published forty books, including the well-received "On Writing," but not everyone was convinced. Harold Bloom fumed that King was a writer of "what used to be called penny dreadfuls." The fact that the National Book Foundation judges "could believe that there is any literary value there or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy." In short, Bloom was annoyed that King had become a dude of literature.

Although dudehood seems to be conferred nowadays for durability as much as for merit, comparisons needn't be invidious. Consider two novels-one literary, the other a mystery-that begin, not far apart in time, on a railway platform:

It was five o'clock on a winter's morning in Syria. Alongside the platform at Aleppo stood the train grandly designated in railway guides as the Taurus Express. It consisted of a kitchen and dining car, a sleeping car and two local coaches.

By the step leading up into the sleeping car stood a young French lieutenant, resplendent in uniform, conversing with a small lean man, muffled up to the ears, of whom nothing was visible but a pink-tipped nose and the two points of an upward curled moustache.

It was freezingly cold, and this job of seeing off a distinguished stranger was not one to be envied, but Lieutenant Dubosc performed his part manfully.

For mystery buffs, no further clues are needed: the sentences open Agatha Christie's "Murder on the Orient Express," still in print after nearly eight decades. Christie's writing is like that of many others in the field: practical, no-nonsense, bordering on cliché, with a faint didactic hum. The scene is set, a tone is established, and nothing, one feels, will come between us and the story.

Now another train station:

The two young men-they were of the English public official class-sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage. The leather straps to the windows were of virgin newness; the mirrors beneath the new luggage racks immaculate as if they had reflected very little; the bulging upholstery in its luxuriant, regulated curves was scarlet and yellow in an intricate, minute dragon pattern, the design of a geometrician in Cologne. The compartment smelt faintly, hygienically of admirable varnish; the train ran as smoothly-Tietjens remembered thinking-as British gilt-edged securities.

The second passage introduces Ford Madox Ford's four-decker novel "Parade's End." Ford also has a story to tell, but he'll take his time about it, unfurling complex sentences in a series of dependent clauses, with an eye toward the unique ("minute dragon pattern") as opposed to the generalized detail ("pink-tipped nose"). Christie's language wants us to settle in; Ford's demands that we pay attention (varnish is admirable, but who knew?), which, of course, puts any serious writer at risk-style may not be the man, but it surely makes us notice him.

The typical genre writer keeps rhetorical flourishes to a minimum, and the typical reader is content to let him. Readers who require more must look either to other kinds of novels or to those genre writers who care deeply about their sentences. Raymond Chandler, for one, professed not to care "a button" for the hardboiled form, yet he wanted to write good hardboiled fiction. To do so, he downplayed plot and concentrated on "experiments in dramatic dialogue . . . what Errol Flynn calls 'the music,' the lines he has to speak."

Still, he knew that certain expectations must be met, since it's the formulaic nature of genre writing (variations serve to underscore such expectations) that keeps us coming back. The reason that Wittgenstein eagerly awaited his monthly copy of Street & Smith's Detective Story is the same that prompted Nadezhda Mandelstam to ask visitors to bring her Agatha Christie's latest. Neither one was after startling revelations about nature or society; they simply wanted the comfort of a familiar voice recounting a story that they hadn't quite heard before. Call it a vice (Edmund Wilson does), call it an addiction (Auden's word), a guilty pleasure in book form simply means time off from heavy lifting or heavy reading. Auden, in truth, didn't do Chandler any favors by admonishing prospective readers that Chandler's books should be "judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art"-because it's only as models of escape literature that they work as art.

Everyone ought to get away once in a while-especially if you're the President. But when Barack Obama bought some books on Martha's Vineyard last August a writer for the National Review seemed put out that they included a trilogy of sinewy crime novels by Daniel Woodrell: "While there is nothing wrong with that per se, not every presidential reading selection is worth revealing to the public. Bill Clinton, for example, used to love mysteries, but he did not advertise the titles of what he once called 'my little cheap-thrills outlet.' "

Apparently, we're still judged by the books we read, and perhaps we should be. Preferring Ken Follett's "On Wings of Eagles" to Henry James's "Wings of the Dove" is not a negligible bias. Nonetheless, we shouldn't sell short the likes of Follett, or, for that matter, Ross Thomas (the smoothest of thriller writers), John Grisham, James Lee Burke, Sue Grafton, Janet Evanovich, Robert Crais, or George Pelecanos, all of whom consistently deliver entertaining works in serviceable prose. Such writers have a gift that is as mysterious to nonwriters as plucking melodies out of thin air is to nonmusicians. Plotting, inventing, creating characters, putting words in their mouths and quirks in their personalities-it all seems pretty astonishing to me. The prose may be uneven and the observations about life and society predictable, but, if the story moves, we, almost involuntarily, move with it. And, if we feel a little guilty about getting so swept up, there's always "The Death of Virgil" to read as penance. ♦

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When Matthew Arnold keeled over, in April, 1888, while hurrying to catch the Liverpool tram, Walt Whitman managed to contain his grief. "He will not be missed," Whitman told a friend. Arnold reaffirmed all that was "rich, hefted, lousy, reeking with delicacy, refinement, elegance, prettiness, propriety, criticism, analysis."

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Gossip Girl taught me how to throw up to get thin. It didn't teach me about the consequences: hair loss, teeth implants and brittle bones. All it took was a dose of control issues coupled with amplified self-hatred, but there's a light at the end of the tunnel. My recovery speaks softly but has a lot to say.

You're going to hurt people and they're still going to care about you.

Your best friend catches you with your fingers down your throat and begs you to eat an apple for lunch. Her heart hurts and you're the one hurting her. When she forces you to eat a slice of pizza, she says she isn't going to let you do this. She loves you at 150 or 105 and she isn't going to stop.

It's not your parents' job to fix you.

And they don't even know how to start. They don't know whether or not to tell you they even know why you go to the bathroom after every meal. You know they know. You resent them for not stopping you or lecturing you or grounding you. Even though, the only person who can stop you is you. If you need help, you need to ask.

You might not think your body is a temple, but your mind deserves some respect.

You're actually kind of witty. People think you're funny and that your sarcasm is charming, but you're too hungry to be witty. You're too busy thinking about eating, not eating, how many calories were in that pastry, how many calories you can cut, how badly you want regular coke, but still drink diet. You're too obsessed to be witty. Give your mind a break and think about something else.

Sex is better when you're not hungry.

You shouldn't have to worry about your thin hipbones grinding into another person too hard or what she thinks of your elbows. Are you just cramping from an empty stomach or is this what it is supposed to feel like? Pleasure, intimacy, love all feel pretty unobtainable when you're trying to not think about what the other person thinks of you... naked.

So is Dating.

How do you enjoy the person you're with if you can't think about anything but dodging dinner? Cut it up into small bits and push it around the plate, offer it to the other person, hope they don't notice. Bring a toothbrush in your purse. Think about fitting in the bathroom trip between dinner and the movie. Say you don't like popcorn at the movies. They do notice.

You don't have to love yourself to love someone else.

You love her, but your therapist told you to try to keep a plant alive for six weeks and that you only love that she loves you, but you love her laugh and the way she tries to sing in French and her patience. You like her wrists and her pretty eyes and the movies she likes. You're not in love with yourself yet, but it doesn't mean you're immune to her. No one could be.

You deserve better.

Everything. You deserve to eat better food, to sleep better, to love more, to live more, to make out more, to have better sex, to drink more, to talk more, to laugh more, to meet better people. You deserve to do it a long time and to do it you have to eat.

You're gay, but it's not the end of the world. It's just the beginning of you.

When you were your thinnest, you met her and then you got thinner. Then she helped you get better. Then you fell in love with her. Mid-manifestation, you had to face the facts; you're gay. You're very, very gay, but it's not the end of being straight. You were never straight to begin with it. It's the beginning of the life you always deserved. (See #7) Enjoy yourself and keep loving her. She is so good for you.

So is eating.

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Gossip Girl taught me how to throw up to get thin. It didn't teach me about the consequences: hair loss, teeth implants and brittle bones. All it took was a dose of control issues coupled with amplified self-hatred, but there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

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I Don’t Understand My Girlfriend’s Biracialism And I Never Will	

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I Don’t Understand My Girlfriend’s Biracialism And I Never Will	

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As always, for Jessa

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I love my girlfriend. This is not a preface to the word "but." I love my girlfriend in the crazy, earth-shattering, stars-exploding, heart-pounding and then falling somewhere into my feet kind of way. She gets me. She knows how I like my coffee, and I know that she is only mean when she is hungry. She knows that I am vain and that I spend too much on clothes and she knows that it's rooted somewhere in my insecurity. I know when she wants to stay in and I know when she needs to be held and I know when she wants something. (Hint: big eyes, only slightly pursed lips.) I know how she speaks when she knows something I don't know. She knows how I speak when I don't know anything at all.

Based on this article, you can tell I often don't know anything at all.

I don't understand her feelings on her biracialism. I want to. Believe me, I really want to. I have the impatience of a toddler; I want to know it now and I want to fix it now. However, growing up in middle class white suburbia didn't gift me with immediate knowledge of diversity, let alone how one person feels on the subject of their own. I don't contemplate how it feels to be a part of two very different worlds, worlds that are discriminatory against one another and not have a choice in the matter. I've never had to ponder my inability to connect with racial identity.

I'm unable to say "I understand" to comfort her, a safe set of words that seem basic to the function of the "I'm sorry" sentiment.

There's no saying "I understand" when she tells you that all those racist jokes you made in high school and that saving her phone contact name as "my Asian friend" when you first met, still hurts her.

There's no saying "I understand" when her Caucasian mother tells her not to be so sensitive.

There's no saying "I understand" when people say they aren't surprised by her 4.0 and they just met her.

There's no saying "I understand" when another guy asks her if she likes anime at a party and she is forced to tell him, no, it's not really her thing.

There's no saying "I understand" when people ask me if I climb the Great Wall of China or if she loves me long time. (She is Japanese, for the record.)

There's no saying "I understand" when people call her white and I have to wonder if she wants that, or if I can correct them.

There's no saying "I understand" when she starts crying in front of a mirror, and says she isn't thin enough to be Asian, but isn't pretty enough to be white. (She is, for the record, the most beautiful girl I've ever seen).

I don't understand. I don't know what it is like to be told that I don't belong when the belonging feels innate. I can only be angry for her and with her and tell her that she is beautiful and tell her that she is intelligent and tell her that they are wrong. They being those who don't understand and me, being one of them by default because like them, I don't get it. Unlike them, I want to get it.

Maybe I'm not supposed to. Maybe I have to wait for her to tell me more, but until then, I'll have to be patient with learning the feelings that come with her identity, the ones that even might be confusing for her.

What I don't have to be, is patient with the people that make her feel this way, and I don't think I ever will be.

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I Don't Understand My Girlfriend's Biracialism And I Never Will

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I love my girlfriend. This is not a preface to the word "but." I love my girlfriend in the crazy, earth-shattering, stars-exploding, heart-pounding and then falling somewhere into my feet kind of way. She gets me. She knows how I like my coffee, and I know that she is only mean when she is hungry.

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On fish, snakes and worms

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On Atomic bombs, Alabama and Shigeru Ito

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"The Mastiff"

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On this month's fiction podcast, Louise Erdrich reads "Mastiff," by Joyce Carol Oates, which appeared in the magazine earlier this year. (Erdrich's latest book, "The Round House," won the National Book Award in 2012.)

In "Mastiff," a couple go on a hike together early in their relationship. She is forty-one; he is somewhat older. They both, Erdrich observes, are "set up as extremely lonely people, desperate to find the other person attractive, and to fall in love somehow." The man and the woman (as they are referred to throughout the story) observe each other closely, each testing the other's potential as a partner.

Oates deftly draws the nuances of their interactions, as when she describes their respective reactions to first encountering a huge dog (a dog that will later introduce a dramatic turn in the story and their relationship) on the trail:

The man, sensing the woman's unease at the sight of the dog, made some joke, which the woman couldn't quite hear and did not acknowledge. They were walking single file, the woman in the lead. She waited for the man to touch her shoulder, as another man might have done, to reassure her, but she knew that he would not, and he did not. Instead the man said, in a tone of slight reproof, that the dog was an English mastiff-"Beautiful dog."

Much of what the man said to the woman, she understood, was in rebuke of her narrow judgment, her timorous ways. Sometimes the man was amused by these qualities. At other times, she saw in his face an expression of startled disapproval, veiled contempt.

The woman said, over her shoulder, with a wild little laugh, "Yes! Beautiful."

You can hear Erdrich read "Mastiff" and discuss it with our fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, by listening above or by downloading the podcast for free from iTunes.
Illustration by Owen Freeman.

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Fiction Podcast: Louise Erdrich Reads Joyce Carol Oates

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On this month's fiction podcast, Louise Erdrich reads "Mastiff," by Joyce Carol Oates, which appeared in the magazine earlier this year. (Erdrich's latest book, "The Round House," won the National Book Award in 2012.) In "Mastiff," a couple go on a hike together early in their relationship.

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He wrote the novel "Horns" which will be made into a film with Daniel Radcliffe.

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Talk dirty to me.
(Trigger warning: gruesome images.)

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Daryl Hall & John Oates-Method Of Modern Love

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This video discusses why Rhetoric of Horror should be included in the rhetorical canon. Some of the images shown may be frightening to younger viewers. Since this video examines the rhetoric of horror, horrific images and a few vulgar words are present.

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On July 24th, five weeks after Bryan Smith hit me with his Dodge van, I began to write again. On Writing, Stephen and Jessa

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When my wife and I are at our summer house in western Maine, I walk four miles every day unless it's pouring down rain. Three miles of this walk are on dirt roads that wind through the woods; a mile of it is on Route 5, a two-lane blacktop highway that runs between Bethel and Fryeburg.

The third week in June of 1999 was an extraordinarily happy one for my wife and for me; our three kids, now grown and scattered across the country, were visiting, and it was the first time in nearly six months that we'd all been under the same roof. As an extra bonus, our first grandchild was in the house, three months old and happily jerking at a helium balloon tied to his foot.

On June 19th, I took our younger son to the Portland Jetport, where he caught a flight back to New York. I drove home, had a brief nap, and then set out on my usual walk. We were planning to go en famille to see a movie in nearby North Conway that evening, and I had just enough time to go for my walk before packing everybody up for the trip.

I set out around four o'clock in the afternoon, as well as I can remember. Just before reaching the main road (in western Maine, any road with a white line running down the middle of it is a main road), I stepped into the woods and urinated. Two months would pass before I was able to take another leak standing up.

When I reached the highway, I turned north, walking on the gravel shoulder, against traffic. One car passed me, also headed north. About three-quarters of a mile farther along, I was told later, the woman driving that car noticed a light-blue Dodge van heading south. The van was looping from one side of the road to the other, barely under the driver's control. When she was safely past the wandering van, the woman turned to her passenger and said, "That was Stephen King walking back there. I sure hope that van doesn't hit him."

Most of the sight lines along the mile-long stretch of Route 5 that I walk are good, but there is one place, a short steep hill, where a pedestrian heading north can see very little of what might be coming his way. I was three-quarters of the way up this hill when the van came over the crest. It wasn't on the road; it was on the shoulder. My shoulder. I had perhaps three-quarters of a second to register this. It was just time enough to think, My God, I'm going to be hit by a school bus, and to start to turn to my left. Then there is a break in my memory. On the other side of it, I'm on the ground, looking at the back of the van, which is now pulled off the road and tilted to one side. This image is clear and sharp, more like a snapshot than like a memory. There is dust around the van's taillights. The license plate and the back windows are dirty. I register these things with no thought of myself or of my condition. I'm simply not thinking.

There's another short break in my memory here, and then I am very carefully wiping palmfuls of blood out of my eyes with my left hand. When I can see clearly, I look around and notice a man sitting on a nearby rock. He has a cane resting in his lap. This is Bryan Smith, the forty-two-year-old man who hit me. Smith has got quite the driving record; he has racked up nearly a dozen vehicle-related offenses. He wasn't watching the road at the moment that our lives collided because his Rottweiler had jumped from the very rear of his van onto the back seat, where there was an Igloo cooler with some meat stored in it. The Rottweiler's name was Bullet. (Smith had another Rottweiler at home; that one was named Pistol.) Bullet started to nose at the lid of the cooler. Smith turned around and tried to push him away. He was still looking at Bullet and pushing his head away from the cooler when he came over the top of the knoll, still looking and pushing when he struck me. Smith told friends later that he thought he'd hit "a small deer" until he noticed my bloody spectacles lying on the front seat of his van. They were knocked from my face when I tried to get out of Smith's way. The frames were bent and twisted, but the lenses were unbroken. They are the lenses I'm wearing now, as I write.

Smith sees that I'm awake and tells me that help is on the way. He speaks calmly, even cheerily. His look, as he sits on the rock with his cane across his lap, is one of pleasant commiseration: Ain't the two of us just had the shittiest luck? it says. He and Bullet had left the campground where they were staying, he later tells an investigator, because he wanted "some of those Marzes bars they have up to the store." When I hear this detail some weeks later, it occurs to me that I have nearly been killed by a character out of one of my own novels. It's almost funny.

Help is on the way, I think, and that's probably good, because I've been in a hell of an accident. I'm lying in the ditch and there's blood all over my face and my right leg hurts. I look down and see something I don't like: my lap appears to be on sideways, as if my whole lower body had been wrenched half a turn to the right. I look back up at the man with the cane and say, "Please tell me it's just dislocated."

"Nah," he says. Like his face, his voice is cheery, only mildly interested. He could be watching all this on TV while he noshes on one of those Marzes bars. "It's broken in five, I'd say, maybe six places."

"I'm sorry," I tell him-God knows why-and then I'm gone again for a little while. It isn't like blacking out; it's more as if the film of memory had been spliced here and there.

When I come back this time, an orange-and-white van is idling at the side of the road with its flashers going. An emergency medical technician-Paul Fillebrown is his name-is kneeling beside me. He's doing something. Cutting off my jeans, I think, although that might have come later.

I ask him if I can have a cigarette. He laughs and says, "Not hardly." I ask him if I'm going to die. He tells me no, I'm not going to die, but I need to go to the hospital, and fast. Which one would I prefer, the one in Norway-South Paris or the one in Bridgton? I tell him I want to go to Bridgton, to Northern Cumberland Memorial Hospital, because my youngest child-the one I just took to the airport-was born there twenty-two years ago. I ask again if I'm going to die, and he tells me again that I'm not. Then he asks me whether I can wiggle the toes of my right foot. I wiggle them, thinking of an old rhyme my mother used to recite: "This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home." I should have stayed home, I think; going for a walk today was a bad idea. Then I remember that sometimes when people are paralyzed they think they're moving but really aren't.

"My toes, did they move?" I ask Paul Fillebrown. He says that they did, a good, healthy wiggle. "Do you swear to God?" I ask him, and I think he does. I'm starting to pass out again. Fillebrown asks me, very slowly and loudly, leaning down over my face, if my wife is at the big house on the lake. I can't remember. I can't remember where any of my family is, but I'm able to give him the telephone numbers both of our big house and of the cottage on the far side of the lake, where my daughter sometimes stays. Hell, I could give him my Social Security number if he asked. I've got all my numbers. It's everything else that's gone.

Other people are arriving now. Somewhere, a radio is crackling out police calls. I'm lifted onto a stretcher. It hurts, and I scream. Then I'm put into the back of the E.M.T. truck, and the police calls are closer. The doors shut and someone up front says, "You want to really hammer it."

Paul Fillebrown sits down beside me. He has a pair of clippers, and he tells me that he's going to have to cut the ring off the third finger of my right hand-it's a wedding ring my wife gave me in 1983, twelve years after we were actually married. I try to tell Fillebrown that I wear it on my right hand because the real wedding ring is still on the ring finger of my left-the original two-ring set cost me fifteen dollars and ninety-five cents at Day's Jewelers in Bangor, and I bought it a year and a half after I'd first met my wife, in the summer of 1969. I was working at the University of Maine library at the time. I had a great set of muttonchop sideburns, and I was staying just off campus, at Ed Price's Rooms (seven bucks a week, one change of sheets included). Men had landed on the moon, and I had landed on the dean's list. Miracles and wonders abounded. One afternoon, a bunch of us library guys had lunch on the grass behind the university bookstore. Sitting between Paolo Silva and Eddie Marsh was a trim girl with a raucous laugh, red-tinted hair, and the prettiest legs I had ever seen. She was carrying a copy of "Soul on Ice." I hadn't run across her in the library, and I didn't believe that a college student could produce such a wonderful, unafraid laugh. Also, heavy reading or no heavy reading, she swore like a millworker. Her name was Tabitha Spruce. We were married in 1971. We're still married, and she has never let me forget that the first time I met her I thought she was Eddie Marsh's townie girlfriend. In fact, we came from similar working-class backgrounds; we both ate meat; we were both political Democrats with typical Yankee suspicions of life outside New England. And the combination has worked. Our marriage has outlasted all of the world's leaders except Castro.

Some garbled version of the ring story comes out, probably nothing that Paul Fillebrown can actually understand, but he keeps nodding and smiling as he cuts that second, more expensive wedding ring off my swollen right hand. By the time I call Fillebrown to thank him, some two months later, I know that he probably saved my life by administering the correct on-scene medical aid and then getting me to a hospital, at a speed of roughly ninety miles an hour, over patched and bumpy back roads.

Fillebrown suggests that perhaps someone else was watching out for me. "I've been doing this for twenty years," he tells me over the phone, "and when I saw the way you were lying in the ditch, plus the extent of the impact injuries, I didn't think you'd make it to the hospital. You're a lucky camper to still be with the program."

The extent of the impact injuries is such that the doctors at Northern Cumberland Hospital decide they cannot treat me there. Someone summons a LifeFlight helicopter to take me to Central Maine Medical Center, in Lewiston. At this point, Tabby, my older son, and my daughter arrive. The kids are allowed a brief visit; Tabby is allowed to stay longer. The doctors have assured her that I'm banged up but I'll make it. The lower half of my body has been covered. She isn't allowed to see the interesting way that my lap has shifted around to the right, but she is allowed to wash the blood off my face and pick some of the glass out of my hair.

There's a long gash in my scalp, the result of my collision with Bryan Smith's windshield. This impact came at a point less than two inches from the steel driver's-side support post. Had I struck that, I would have been killed or rendered permanently comatose. Instead, I was thrown over the van and fourteen feet into the air. If I had landed on the rocks jutting out of the ground beyond the shoulder of Route 5, I would also likely have been killed or permanently paralyzed, but I landed just shy of them. "You must have pivoted to the left just a little at the last second," I am told later, by the doctor who takes over my case. "If you hadn't, we wouldn't be having this conversation."

The LifeFlight helicopter arrives in the parking lot, and I am wheeled out to it. The clatter of the helicopter's rotors is loud. Someone shouts into my ear, "Ever been in a helicopter before, Stephen?" The speaker sounds jolly, excited for me. I try to say yes, I've been in a helicopter before-twice, in fact-but I can't. It's suddenly very tough to breathe. They load me into the helicopter. I can see one brilliant wedge of blue sky as we lift off, not a cloud in it. There are more radio voices. This is my afternoon for hearing voices, it seems. Meanwhile, it's getting even harder to breathe. I gesture at someone, or try to, and a face bends upside down into my field of vision.

"Feel like I'm drowning," I whisper.

Somebody checks something, and someone else says, "His lung has collapsed."

There's a rattle of paper as something is unwrapped, and then the second person speaks into my ear, loudly so as to be heard over the rotors: "We're going to put a chest tube in you, Stephen. You'll feel some pain, a little pinch. Hold on."

It's been my experience that if a medical person tells you that you're going to feel a little pinch he's really going to hurt you. This time, it isn't as bad as I expected, perhaps because I'm full of painkillers, perhaps because I'm on the verge of passing out again. It's like being thumped on the right side of my chest by someone holding a short sharp object. Then there's an alarming whistle, as if I'd sprung a leak. In fact, I suppose I have. A moment later, the soft in-out of normal respiration, which I've listened to my whole life (mostly without being aware of it, thank God), has been replaced by an unpleasant shloop-shloop-shloop sound. The air I'm taking in is very cold, but it's air, at least, and I keep breathing it. I don't want to die, and, as I lie in the helicopter looking out at the bright summer sky, I realize that I am actually lying in death's doorway. Someone is going to pull me one way or the other pretty soon; it's mostly out of my hands. All I can do is lie there and listen to my thin, leaky breathing: shloop-shloop-shloop.

Ten minutes later, we set down on the concrete landing pad of the Central Maine Medical Center. To me, it feels as if we're at the bottom of a concrete well. The blue sky is blotted out, and the whap-whap-whap of the helicopter rotors becomes magnified and echoey, like the clapping of giant hands.

Still breathing in great leaky gulps, I am lifted out of the helicopter. Someone bumps the stretcher, and I scream. "Sorry, sorry, you're O.K., Stephen," someone says-when you're badly hurt, everyone calls you by your first name.

"Tell Tabby I love her very much," I say as I am first lifted and then wheeled very fast down some sort of descending walkway. I suddenly feel like crying.

"You can tell her that yourself," the someone says. We go through a door. There is air-conditioning, and lights flow past overhead. Doctors are paged over loudspeakers. It occurs to me, in a muddled sort of way, that just an hour ago I was taking a walk and planning to pick some berries in a field that overlooks Lake Kezar. I wasn't going to pick for long, though; I'd have to be home by five-thirty because we were going to see "The General's Daughter," starring John Travolta. Travolta played the bad guy in the movie version of "Carrie," my first novel, a long time ago.

"When?" I ask. "When can I tell her?"

"Soon," the voice says, and then I pass out again. This time, it's no splice but a great big whack taken out of the memory film; there are a few flashes, confused glimpses of faces and operating rooms and looming X-ray machinery; there are delusions and hallucinations, fed by the morphine and Dilaudid dripping into me; there are echoing voices and hands that reach down to paint my dry lips with swabs that taste of peppermint. Mostly, though, there is darkness.

Bryan Smith's estimate of my injuries turned out to be conservative. My lower leg was broken in at least nine places. The orthopedic surgeon who put me together again, the formidable David Brown, said that the region below my right knee had been reduced to "so many marbles in a sock." The extent of those lower-leg injuries necessitated two deep incisions-they're called medial and lateral fasciotomies-to release the pressure caused by my exploded tibia and also to allow blood to flow back into my lower leg. If I hadn't had the fasciotomies (or if they had been delayed), it probably would have been necessary to amputate my leg. My right knee was split almost directly down the middle, and I suffered an acetabular fracture of the right hip-a serious derailment, in other words-and an open femoral intertrochanteric fracture in the same area. My spine was chipped in eight places. Four ribs were broken. My right collarbone held, but the flesh above it had been stripped raw. The laceration in my scalp took almost thirty stitches.

Yeah, on the whole I'd say Bryan Smith was a tad conservative.

Mr. Smith's driving behavior in this case was eventually examined by a grand jury, which indicted him on two counts: driving to endanger (pretty serious) and aggravated assault (very serious, the kind of thing that means jail time). After due consideration, the district attorney responsible for prosecuting such cases in my corner of the world allowed Smith to plead out to the lesser charge of driving to endanger. He received six months of county jail time (sentence suspended) and a year's suspension of his right to drive. He was also placed on probation for a year, with restrictions on other motor vehicles, such as snowmobiles and A.T.V.s. Bryan Smith could conceivably be back on the road in the fall or winter of 2001.

David Brown put my leg back together in five marathon surgical procedures that left me thin, weak, and nearly at the end of my endurance. They also left me with at least a fighting chance to walk again. A large steel and carbon-fibre apparatus called an external fixator was clamped to my leg. Eight large steel pegs called Schanz pins ran through the fixator and into the bones above and below my knee. Five smaller steel rods radiated out from the knee. These looked sort of like a child's drawing of sunrays. The knee itself was locked in place. Three times a day, nurses unwrapped the smaller pins and the much larger Schanz pins and swabbed the holes with hydrogen peroxide. I've never had my leg dipped in kerosene and then lit on fire, but if that ever happens I'm sure it will feel quite a bit like daily pin care.

I entered the hospital on June 19th. Around the thirtieth, I got up for the first time, staggering three steps to a commode, where I sat with my hospital johnny in my lap and my head down, trying not to weep and failing. I told myself that I had been lucky, incredibly lucky, and usually that worked, because it was true. Sometimes it didn't work, that's all-and then I cried.

A day or two after those initial steps, I started physical therapy. During my first session, I managed ten steps in a downstairs corridor, lurching along with the help of a walker. One other patient was learning to walk again at the same time as me, a wispy eighty-year-old woman named Alice, who was recovering from a stroke. We cheered each other on when we had enough breath to do so. On our third day in the hall, I told Alice that her slip was showing.

"Your ass is showing, sonny boy," she wheezed, and kept going.

By July 4th, I was able to sit up in a wheelchair long enough to go out to the loading dock behind the hospital and watch the fireworks. It was a fiercely hot night, the streets filled with people eating snacks, drinking beer and soda, watching the sky. Tabby stood next to me, holding my hand, as the sky lit up red and green, blue and yellow. She was staying in a condo apartment across the street from the hospital, and each morning she brought me poached eggs and tea. I could use the nourishment, it seemed. In 1997, I weighed two hundred and sixteen pounds. On the day that I was released from Central Maine Medical Center, I weighed a hundred and sixty-five.

I came home to Bangor on July 9th, after a hospital stay of three weeks, and began a daily-rehabilitation program that included stretching, bending, and crutch-walking. I tried to keep my courage and my spirits up. On August 4th, I went back to C.M.M.C. for another operation. When I woke up this time, the Schanz pins in my upper thigh were gone. Dr. Brown pronounced my recovery "on course" and sent me home for more rehab and physical therapy. (Those of us undergoing P.T. know that the letters actually stand for Pain and Torture.) And in the midst of all this something else happened.

On July 24th, five weeks after Bryan Smith hit me with his Dodge van, I began to write again.

I didn't want to go back to work. I was in a lot of pain, unable to bend my right knee. I couldn't imagine sitting behind a desk for long, even in a wheelchair. Because of my cataclysmically smashed hip, sitting was torture after forty minutes or so, impossible after an hour and a quarter. How was I supposed to write when the most pressing thing in my world was how long until the next dose of Percocet?

Yet, at the same time, I felt that I was all out of choices. I had been in terrible situations before, and writing had helped me get over them-had helped me to forget myself, at least for a little while. Perhaps it would help me again. It seemed ridiculous to think it might be so, given the level of my pain and physical incapacitation, but there was that voice in the back of my mind, patient and implacable, telling me that, in the words of the Chambers Brothers, the "time has come today." It was possible for me to disobey that voice but very difficult not to believe it.

In the end, it was Tabby who cast the deciding vote, as she so often has at crucial moments. The former Tabitha Spruce is the person in my life who's most likely to say that I'm working too hard, that it's time to slow down, but she also knows that sometimes it's the work that bails me out. For me, there have been times when the act of writing has been an act of faith, a spit in the eye of despair. Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life. When I told Tabby on that July morning that I thought I'd better go back to work, I expected a lecture. Instead, she asked me where I wanted to set up. I told her I didn't know, hadn't even thought about it.

For years after we were married, I had dreamed of having the sort of massive oak-slab desk that would dominate a room-no more child's desk in a trailer closet, no more cramped kneehole in a rented house. In 1981, I had found that desk and placed it in a spacious, skylighted study in a converted stable loft at the rear of our new house. For six years, I had sat behind that desk either drunk or wrecked out of my mind, like a ship's captain in charge of a voyage to nowhere. Then, a year or two after I sobered up, I got rid of it and put in a living-room suite where it had been. In the early nineties, before my kids had moved on to their own lives, they sometimes came up there in the evening to watch a basketball game or a movie and eat a pizza. They usually left a boxful of crusts behind, but I didn't care. I got another desk-handmade, beautiful, and half the size of my original T. rex-and I put it at the far-west end of the office, in a corner under the eave. Now, in my wheelchair, I had no way to get to it.

Tabby thought about it for a moment and then said, "I can rig a table for you in the back hall, outside the pantry. There are plenty of outlets-you can have your Mac, the little printer, and a fan." The fan was a must-it had been a terrifically hot summer, and on the day I went back to work the temperature outside was ninety-five. It wasn't much cooler in the back hall.

Tabby spent a couple of hours putting things together, and that afternoon she rolled me out through the kitchen and down the newly installed wheelchair ramp into the back hall. She had made me a wonderful little nest there: laptop and printer connected side by side, table lamp, manuscript (with my notes from the month before placed neatly on top), pens, and reference materials. On the corner of the desk was a framed picture of our younger son, which she had taken earlier that summer.

"Is it all right?" she asked.

"It's gorgeous," I said.

She got me positioned at the table, kissed me on the temple, and then left me there to find out if I had anything left to say. It turned out I did, a little. That first session lasted an hour and forty minutes, by far the longest period I'd spent upright since being struck by Smith's van. When it was over, I was dripping with sweat and almost too exhausted to sit up straight in my wheelchair. The pain in my hip was just short of apocalyptic. And the first five hundred words were uniquely terrifying-it was as if I'd never written anything before in my life. I stepped from one word to the next like a very old man finding his way across a stream on a zigzag line of wet stones.

Tabby brought me a Pepsi-cold and sweet and good-and as I drank it I looked around and had to laugh despite the pain. I'd written "Carrie" and "Salem's Lot" in the laundry room of a rented trailer. The back hall of our house resembled it enough to make me feel as if I'd come full circle.

There was no miraculous breakthrough that afternoon, unless it was the ordinary miracle that comes with any attempt to create something. All I know is that the words started coming a little faster after a while, then a little faster still. My hip still hurt, my back still hurt, my leg, too, but those hurts began to seem a little farther away. I'd got going; there was that much. After that, things could only get better.

Things have continued to get better. I've had two more operations on my leg since that first sweltering afternoon in the back hall. I've also had a fairly serious bout of infection, and I still take roughly a hundred pills a day, but the external fixator is now gone and I continue to write. On some days, that writing is a pretty grim slog. On others-more and more of them, as my mind reaccustoms itself to its old routine-I feel that buzz of happiness, that sense of having found the right words and put them in a line. It's like lifting off in an airplane: you're on the ground, on the ground, on the ground . . . and then you're up, riding on a cushion of air and the prince of all you survey. I still don't have much strength-I can do a little less than half of what I used to be able to do in a day-but I have enough. Writing did not save my life, but it is doing what it has always done: it makes my life a brighter and more pleasant place. ♦

Stephen King, whose first story for the magazine, "The Man in the Black Suit," appeared in 1994 and earned an O. Henry Award, has a new novel, "Finders Keepers," coming out in June.
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When my wife and I are at our summer house in western Maine, I walk four miles every day unless it's pouring down rain. Three miles of this walk are on dirt roads that wind through the woods; a mile of it is on Route 5, a two-lane blacktop highway that runs between Bethel and Fryeburg.