Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends

Publishers Weekly, in a review of Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends, a book of essays, says Chabon is "bitter and defensive about his love for genre fiction such as mysteries and comic books," and that it's "hard to imagine an audience for this book." Granted, I didn't buy it - it was a gift from a friend of my husband, a man who knows I'm a writer and who made the effort to acquire a signed copy for me. I'm really very grateful -- let me tell you why.

Years ago, after moving to Georgia, I had the chance to hear Chabon speak at the Marcus Jewish Community Center in Atlanta, shortly after he was awarded the Pulitzer for Kavalier & Clay, a novel that taught me much about expanding my vision as a writer; phrases such as "slumped like a question mark against the door frame" and "a canoe of lemon" made me realize I'd not been thinking like a writer, but a reader, and that I had a lot of work to do.

At the community center that night, a young man in the audience raised his hand and asked, "How do you handle those times when you're worried you might offend someone with something you've written?" Chabon said, "Look, if you never offend anyone, you're probably not doing your job."

And now, some eight years later, he defends that remark in his Maps and Legends essay, "The Recipe for Life," in which he says:

"Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn't give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn't court disapproval, reproach, and general wrath, whether of friends, family or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth."

Perhaps Publisher's Weekly missed this essay, and if so, it's a shame. It's the most relevant advice I've read about how writers can best help themselves. As for audience: one can only imagine.