All I Want Is To Be Humbled By My Success This Year

All I want is to become well and truly humbled by my success this year.

I’ve already been humbled by my failures and ordinariness, so for this year, I think I would prefer only to be humbled by my success. I would be very humble about it. It would probably be the making of me.

“Have you noticed,” people would say, “how much humbler Danny seems to have grown this year? And he was pretty humble already, I thought.” And I would be all the humbler for my tremendous success. It would make me stop and appreciate all the simple things. Which I already do, being pretty humble to begin with, but now the things I appreciate are even simpler: Buttons, shoelaces, plain toast, cotton socks, generic facial tissues, lightbulbs, and so on.

All I want is to experience so much overwhelming, undeniable success this year that I have no choice but to become incredibly easy-going, retiring, and humble in the face of it. No one would begrudge me all that success, because of how much character I would cultivate as a result.

“If any other member of my acquaintance racked up this kind of success in a single year,” people would say, “I would cheerfully cut their throats as soon as say hello. But with him, I don’t seem to mind it so much, on account of how humble he is about it.” Yes, everyone would agree that I carry it well, just like when I put on weight seasonally. and that while they would like to be jealous of all my success, they simply can’t bring themselves to feel it, because I’ve hardly even noticed the success.

I won’t pretend the success isn’t there. This is my solemn promise. I won’t pretend to notice all the awards, the citations for excellence, the grants and the stipends and the endowed chairs, the conferment of decorations and distinctions, the inductions into various fraternal orders, the keys to various cities, and so on. That would be an insult to the people around me, and I wouldn’t do that to you. But I will acknowledge it once, lightly, and then carry on.

I just want to experience so much success in the next calendar year that I become perfectly polite, perfectly patient, and perfectly at ease with all circumstances for the rest of my life. I’ll be so generous, so open-minded, so free from pettiness, resentment, and irritibility, that even my greatest enemies will openly pattern their conduct after mine, “because he knows how to live — he has been made more humble by his success.”

If for some reason this is not possible — if the success is not available, or already earmarked for somebody else — then I would like to receive no success at all, and try again next year. The thing I would like least is to receive a little bit of success this year, not so much that anyone thinks humility is called for. I would rather be in a number of low-speed car crashes, or develop a new food allergy, than experience a moderate amount of success this year. Please God, let me be so successful this year that people start asking me how I stay humble. I don’t think I can stand it otherwise.

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Incidentally, I still have a few stops left on the Women’s Hotel book tour if you’d like to come and say hello!

On Wednesday, November 13 at 2pm I’ll be giving a talk about midcentury domestic fiction at Sarah Lawrence (which is open to the public, not just students) in Bronxville, NY.

On Tuesday, November 19 at 7pm I’ll be reading at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City, IA.

On Wednesday, November 20 at 8pm EST I’ll be talking with Roxane Gay about Women’s Hotel for the Audacity Book Club on Zoom.

On Saturday, November 30 at 6pm I’ll be in conversation with Austin Channing Brown at the Ann Arbor District Library in the first floor lobby.

And I’ll be at the Savannah Book Festival in February and the Tucson Festival of Books in March.

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