Fosse’s ambivalence is too familiar: the act of writing joyful, the result painful. “If I read my writing, a great pain often washes over me,” he confesses in An Angel Walks Through the Stage. “Perhaps it is like that for others who read what I write.” It is a statement as much about solitude as about reception. He writes without imagining a reader, and yet his words are published, read, felt. I returned to this passage after revising something of my own, encountering that same recoil (that disbelief that the work, now external, once came through me). It is not clarity that writing produces but an intensification of tension: joy in doing, pain in having done. “It is not that simple,” Fosse concludes. No, but it is recognisable.
This is lovely