Thomas didn't answer. He had, in fact, booked the trip after his sister found him curled up in the tub at his new apartment, shivering under a shower that had run cold. She called her husband, a self-styled amateur psychologist with a graduate degree in botany, and the two of them staged an intervention.
I wasn’t reading it as a student, forced to write some terrible essay about “themes” and “symbolism,” and I wasn’t reading it as an emo high-schooler, desperate for an angsty kid narrator with whom to identify. I was reading Salinger as an adult, a father...
...there are thousands of blog entries and academic articles and craft essays in print and online that discuss the “writer’s process,” how we’re able to find the time in our busy schedules to sketch out stories and novels and memoirs, but so few consider the precious time that we devote to our reading lives.