Note: I cut this section from today’s newsletter because I thought it was too bitchy. But what is a blog for if not for bitching?

I had a maddening experience last week reading Adam Phillips’ On Giving Up.

Here is a critically-acclaimed writer I find genuinely interesting — his Paris Review interview is one of my all-time favorites — whose style I cannot stand.

Still, I could not give up On Giving Up, because I liked thinking about so much of what he was thinking about, and I found myself becoming enraged that he had all these interesting things for me to think about but he couldn’t be clearer about them, damn it!

I became further enraged when I read about his method of composition:

Those who find writing a chore are better off not knowing about the literary method of Adam Phillips. Every Wednesday he walks to his office in Notting Hill. On this brief journey some idea begins to take shape, usually related to his day job (Phillips is a Freudian psychoanalyst who spends the rest of the week seeing patients). So long as this notion sparks his interest it will – by the time he sits down at his computer – have been transmuted into his first sentence. The next hours are spent unfurling that sentence into an essay, which typically forms part of a collection. Over 30 years this routine has produced almost as many books, in Phillips’s breezy, aphoristic style, on topics ranging from monogamy to sanity to democracy.

How nice for him! I thought.

Then I read about how he puts together his books: 

I don’t think too much about whether it all hangs together. I just write things that engage me, and then, when they get collected into a book like this, I trust that certain preoccupations will work themselves through. Otherwise, it becomes too tendentious and too focused and I don’t want that to be the case. When I read through the essays, I’ll keep the ones that I do still think are good and then I’ll think of what sort of order they might go in. The writing of the book, in a way, is putting them in an order.

I then had to walk away from the computer and double check that I took my blood pressure medication.

Once again, I must practice my mantra: “It wasn’t for me.”

One thing you can be sure of is that while you’re busy bitching about somebody else’s book, they’re off somewhere writing another one! (They win. You lose.)