Although of Course You End Up at the End of the Tour

by Maria Bustillos

This whole idea of being “the best” writer seems kind of questionable to me.

Hemingway once wrote to Fitzgerald: Your problem is you keep trying to write masterpieces. Just write as well as you can every day, and know that it will be good and at the end you’ll have a really good book. But if you try to write masterpieces, nothing will come. That’s what happens to people when they get the acclaim that they want for their work. That’s what David says at the end of the book: If you listen to the outside culture, if you care what they think about you, the weapon pointed at you goes from being a .22 to being a .45…

There’s a moment in the movie where Segel says to Eisenberg on the airplane, “David, this isn’t real.” And in the book he goes on, and says, “What’s real is being in a room with a piece of paper,” right?

What’s real is that the movie has the same sense of who this person was when he was alive that the book has. The other stuff — people writing essays about how they won’t see the movie, or former friends of his saying that they don’t like the way it is? — that’s the part that in the movie, and in the book, David is saying, “It isn’t real.”

I wrote that book primarily as a fan. Here is how this great writer thought about his life, and this is how he lived. This is literally just what he would want strangers to know about him. Remember, he’s working the tape by the end of the book — he’s stopping it, deciding how he wants to phrase his life, and then turning it back on.

Read the rest at The Awl.