Road to Elsewhere, Excerpt #18: "As a Writer, You Aren't Anybody Until you Become Somebody"

James Salter and my dad threw down the gauntlet. Would I pick it up? And what's a gauntlet, anyway?*

JAMES SALTER CLARIFIED MY PROBLEM with the heavy typewriter I’d lugged across an ocean and several arrondissements, to 101 Boulevard Raspail, in Paris. “As a writer,” the author of the delightfully salacious A Sport and a Pastime wrote, “you aren’t anybody until you become somebody.” 

It’s a tautology, yes, but it’s somewhat redeemed by the “writer” part. 

And that was another part of my mission in Paris: to become somebody. Or at least make a start. Until that point I’d been the combination of the expectations of the people around me. I excelled at being all things to other people. 

I was a surprisingly good student in college. At Bates, in Lewiston, Maine, I swapped my high-school ennui with a terror that I would be quickly expelled from campus trailing a flutter of F-marked blue booklets. In my anxiety, I made a study schedule and stuck with it. Soon, to my amazement, I was logging straight A’s. Perhaps my three older brothers, who had spent two decades pointing out how dumb I was, we…