54. Following a ghost

I was looking forward to reading Biography of X by Catherine Lacey, I enjoyed reading Pew by the same author, but after I did I was left with a strange emotion. 

How could I call this emotion? Probably - unrest  or feeling fidgety. I mean, why would someone jump so many hurdles to invent a character, immerse it in a fictional life, which is a figment of the character's imagination as well, make it live among numerous other fictional characters and call all this a biography? 

I thought about it and in the end I guess it’s the game, the process of building a person, that was the appeal. Otherwise, I do not see why put yourself through all this gruesome work. 

This makes me think about the purpose of writing in general. 

Why do people who call themselves writers, sit and translate their ideas into words that build sentences and thus stories? 

The process cannot be enjoyable UNLESS it’s the process by which the person is escaping reality, a process that brings them comfort to some degree. 

I love reading biographies but in this case, knowing that it was a fictive biography, I kind of didn’t see the point. I mean, whenever I read biographies I am curious to know how someone, who was meanigulf enought" that a biography was written about them, managed life. How they grew above or grew wide enough to contain whatever was going on in their life so that they could create a new life or give it a meaning. 

So you probably understand why I felt like I got nothing out of this book, but the admiration for the literary virtuosity of its author.

Don’t trust me, go ahead and read it! Try to see if you can find the real matroschka 🙂