How to Live

IT IS hard to believe now, but until relatively recently there were usually just two places you could see a writer you admired: on the back flap of a book or at a public event. In the 1960s and 1970s, a very small number of writers, James Baldwin and Gore Vidal among them, appeared on television, often as guests on evening talk shows. But to listen to recordings of most writers’ voices, let alone watch video clips of them speaking? You had to go to a research university’s archives for such communion. Now I can pull up all this and more on a phone smaller than a piece of toast. Countless recorded interviews, talks, and readings are at our fingertips.

The memory of what came before lives in my library. The older my books are, the easier they open to the back flap. I’d frequently flip there if I was really enjoying a collection of poems or stories. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was a way to make the intimacy of reading a little more real. “Who are you?” I remember thinking while reading Anne Carson’s Plainwater: Essays and Poetry when it was published by Knopf in 1995. According to the flap copy, this was the wrong question. “Anne Carson lives in Canada” was the only bio note; no photo.

I kept asking this question of writers anyway, and when I was just out of college the search for answers often drew me to literary readings. I moved to New