In my experience the hardest part about coming out with a book is you spend anywhere from one week to one month afterwards going around absolutely furious that you haven’t won an award yet. You haven’t got any particular award in mind, of course. And no sense of what it is you think you’ve accomplished that merits one. Any award will do, just for being sort of terrific overall. No particular aim or grievance, just a general simmering sense of having been cheated, like a dog that can smell but not see dinner cooking on the stove. I knew it had gotten to about its peak a few weeks in, when someone at work said “Your hair looks nice today, Danny,” and I thought, Oho, so it’s like that, then, is it? My hair’s been looking bad all this time, and this is how you tell me? I’ll fix you.
Anyhow I’ve been giving the matter a lot of thought, and I’d like an award for only the first page of the book, which I think is more than fair. You are aware, I am sure, of the very common practice of putting two epigraphs at the beginning of one’s novel.1 The first one is serious and high-culture, the second one is joking and ideally low-culture, even better if it undercuts the effect of the first.
I didn’t do that. I did two epigraphs for Meeting New People, of course, because I’m only human and epigraphs are a lot of fun, but they’re both straight across-the-board the same level of sincere. They communicate similar ideas and sit in similar emotional registers. One isn’t funnier than the other, and neither complicates its fellow. The first one is just about friendship, and the second one is about friendship and food.
I wonder if you realize how rare this is, and how much I ought to be fussed over for not having done one serious epigraph and one funny epigraph. Sometimes people will even do two serious epigraphs and one very short funny epigraph. Sometimes the funny epigraph is just the tagline to an old commercial or something. You know the formula I mean:
Quote from Freud/Nietzsche/Virgil/Wittgenstein
Something from a zoologist about animal behavior in deadly scenarios
“I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.” Or if the book came out fifteen years ago, a Kanye West lyric, but now that sort of thing doesn’t win you points with the type of people it used to, so it’s likelier to be part of a jingle, or a children’s rhyme, or something like that.
It’s the same thing all the time, and I didn’t do it, and even though the book came out two months ago, no one has pointed it out to praise me for it yet, so I’m going to have to do it myself. I don’t mind, I’m perfectly happy to do it.
I know some people just do the one epigraph, but I don’t want to talk about them just now, as the practice undercuts my point.