I've gotten in trouble with my publicist for having used this space to point out inaccuracies in reportage about my book and my personal life. (Any press, even snarky press, must be viewed as beneficial. To complain is to be viewed as a whiner, a malcontent, an agitator. Now get back in line!)

So, please understand that I think this is funny, and that I AM NOT COMPLAINING! I really just got a kick out of it....

A group of people called The Underground Literary Alliance began, a few years ago, to accost writers at readings. The group believed that all published writers were part of some corrupt, insider's game—and that, if you were not part of the New York literary scene, then you were forever an outsider, someone without hope of being published. (The ULA came to a reading I did a few years ago at the The Whitney Museum for the literary journal McSweeneys, but they didn't throw tomatoes or anything.) More recently, when my latest book came out, the folks who post on Literary Rejections on Display started to insult it—without having read a word of my writing—because they thought I was getting too much attention for it; if I was getting attention, they assumed, I must be part of some literary clique, some shadowy insider. (The people who run LROD are quite nice, actually—and, after the kerfuffle there about my book, they decided to have my novel be the subject of their first online book club—much to my happy surprise and the chagrin of some of the people who post there.) And there's another blog I won't link to—or even mention by name—which has also come after me, for much the same reason, but with more vitriol and less coherence.

So I wanted to address the question: Is there a New York literary scene, and if so, does being a part of it help you get published, no matter your talent (or lack thereof)?

I don't know. I certainly didn't have any writer friends—or any publishing connections—before I published my first book. Still, I did live in New York, and so thereby was able to walk my manuscripts over to publishers and agents, and I admit—I did go to readings, not only for the entertainment, but also hoping to meet people. And now that I am published, I further admit: I do have a lot of writer friends, and even play in a poker game with a number of high-profile authors. (And, yes, the truth is, there is some logrolling in this business. You can trace the genealogy of a number of literary cliques by paying attention to who’s blurbing one another’s books. This is truly a bad thing. To paraphrase the writer Fiona Maazel, whom I'm also friendly with: books that don't win some big-name blurb have a harder time getting noticed.)  

But I think that what's going on is less professional than personal: It's rewarding to be a part of a writers’ community. Cheesy as that sounds, it’s true. There's no water cooler we in this solitary job can go to; shop talk is hard to come by. And I think very few people succeed in this business based on connections. Your work eventually has to find readers, and that has nothing to do with whose friend you are. Publishers aren't going to waste their money, in this economy, publishing someone as a favor to someone else. And again, most writers I know became friends with other writers only after they were published.  

In the middle of the strangeness of a book-tour—there being a limo driver to schlep you three hours to events where you sell twelve books; your flopsweating through five minutes on morning TV, where hosts haven’t read the book or worn pants to cover their legs under their cut-rate anchorman’s desks—in the middle of book-tour strangeness, you don’t expect to learn something heavy about yourself.

I write fiction. My first book was about Asian conjoined twins from the 18^th century, so you see just how close to home I’m comfortable being. Not that I have a thing against non-fiction—but I’ve been more focused on its imaginary friend. Maybe that’s my way of having avoided the more personal, the more keep-off-the-grass parts of my brain. But recently I tried staring directly at a subject I’ve been brave enough only to squint and mumble at for years:

I was in a car accident in high school; someone died.

I don’t know why I’ve been drawn to write about it now I’ve been a professional writer for eight years, and had three books before this one, and never dared go near the subject—but I’ve felt compelled to examine it now: the bombshell and the pain of it. That’s what writers do, I told myself (I hope not too pretentiously): We write about things to understand them. And so I did a piece for the IraGlass show This American Life.

I don’t want to get into the details of the accident now. (You can go here if you’re interested.) But I’ll say only that it was what the insurance companies deem a “no fault” accident, and the police call a “dart out”: when someone hurries into a looming car.

Anyway, I’ve started reading my This American Life piece about the accident at author events. I don’t know why.This secret that I’d been hiding for years, this lockbox that I’d only open to my very closest friends—I’ve started spilling it to rooms full of strangers.

I hope it’s not—and I don’t think it’s true—that I crave the sympathy of others. No, I'm pretty sure it’s not that; I actually feel gross whenever someone comes up to tell me how sorry they are for me, as if I’d used the accident to score pity points. But it must be something about the act of confession, public confession, the way people do it in AA meetings. I found I needed to do this. I know that sounds cheesy.

And this will sound cheesy, too, and self-congratulatory: But I think some people actually kind of needed to have heard it. I only say this because I’ve been flooded with e-mails—just two days after the piece aired—from people who went through similar things, or people who are just dealing with grief of any kind.

The researchers at This American Life found an article that explained how, in the U.S., some 2,000 people a year live through a “dart out” accident—and that those drivers are likely to feel post-traumatic stress syndrome. More likely, in fact, than are people who are actually at fault in a fatal accident. Why? It’s hard to learn so viscerally that the universe is managed with indifference, by chance.

In my last post, I wrote that becoming a writer makes you most yourself when by yourself. I take it back.

I've been very lucky. I know that.

(Before the cannonade of angry comments comes–and it will come–know that I know I've been lucky.)

And off we go!

It happens at every reading. It happened in St. Louis. It happened in Portland, Maine. Someone comes up to ask about becoming a writer, about the ways and the hows of it.

And I go all at once into a feeling of protectiveness, of pity. I’m like a boxer who, having miraculously survived the terrors of his sport, wants to keep the innocents from lifting the turnbuckle, from stepping into that ring. Don't do it. It's hard.

I'm not talking an occasional stalker hard. Nor people-come-after-you-merely-because-they-don't-like-your-author-photo hard. (Though these particular people ended up being nice; actually, and kindly, they’re now having a book club reading of my novel). Anyway, I don't mean even that it's hard to face what Martin Amis has called the "veritable dunceiad" of American book criticism.

I'm talking, instead, about the impossible balancing act–being thick-skinned enough to shrug off the snark that finds everyone who puts himself out for criticism in the public sphere, while at the same time being sensitive enough to stay awake to all the human cues, to the peculiarities of our world that it's a novelist's job to notice, and keep on noticing.

Every writer I know secretly thinks she deserves every bad review she gets, and at the same time is furious that her publisher is failing to do more to get the word out about the most brilliant book of the year–hers.

Maybe that’s insanity. But it’s a particular kind of insanity. To be a fiction writer–like probably any non-improvising artist–you need to be a bifurcated person. You have to be both clinically arrogant (to think anyone would care to read your take on things; also to have the confidence to get your prose peacocking across the page), and you have to be unusually humble (to have modesty enough to accept criticisms from the better angels of your friends; to have the ability to see what crap your first draft really is, and in what fixable ways). You have to be Bruce Banner; you have also to be the Hulk.

And yes, I know it’s easy for me to say these things; I’ve been published. I’ve made it over the fence. I’ve even been on national television. But it’s not a career I’d wish on, say, my sons.

I don’t mean to be discouraging. If you want to be a writer–want and need to write–then no one and nothing can stop you. But just think you should know these kind of things, going in. 

I’ve been everywhere, Johnny Cash sang (or sings still, in theubiquity of car rental ads, the incessancy of TV). I know how the manfeels. These last weeks have seen me in Los Angeles, Chicago, LosAngeles again, New York, Los Angeles yet again, San Francisco,Menlo Park (CA),Oakland, Portland (OR.), Seattle, Bluffton (S.C.), St.Louis, Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee, New York again, and Boston—withPortland (ME) coming the day after tomorrow.

It’s been fascinating, in this time of ascending economic worry, todrive through all the different but similarly gentrifying downtowns,the abandoned or converted factories, and—ringing every city—the glossyoffice buildings done in the bland, tipped-over refrigerator style. I’msure all you cartographic sociologists out there would know better thanI just how much this list tends toward the blue end of our two-colorpolitical map. (When did Red-State/Blue-State get to be a shibboleth weall return to?)

What I do know is that people at readings—for a novel, no less—havebeen wanting to talk more about politics than they have at any of myother book tours. (This is my fifth one now—though it’s admittedly muchbigger than the ones I did for my other two books.) Maybe that’sbecause my novel is tangentially—and coincidentally—about some of themost severe weather of this campaign climate (race, gender, healthcare, privacy). But I suspect it’s about something else: people justwant to discuss the direction of the country—in a way they didn’t in,say, the summer of 2000, when my first book came out.

All the same, and perhaps not surprisingly in a season that finds the President at a 23 percent approval rating (and Congress even lower, everyone I’ve talked to—and I mean everyone—talkedabout wanting the country to change: fundamentally, necessarily,quickly. I found it striking, how often all different types of peoplejust came up and wanted to talk it out, to commiserate, to findreassurance from a stranger.

I’m not a political reporter, nor a pundit anywhere but in my livingroom, so I won’t attempt any grand statements or predictions. (Theymight be even likelier to be wrong than are the things professionalpundits write.) But the dissatisfaction all over the country ispalpable—one woman at a reading asked me: “Do you think the economywill turn around soon?” I explained that, as a novelist, I knew no moreabout that than any other lay person would. She kind of shrunk in onherself, like a child who is told that Santa is a fake, just a guy witha gut, a rented suit, a removable beard.

The cab driver in St. Louis, the bookstore owner in Boston, thehousewife who wanted her book signed in Minnesota—they all wanted toget into it, to unload, without even a preamble of small talk.

On a side note, I recently caught one of the Paul Simon concerts atthe Brooklyn Academy of Music (with David Byrne and a raft of Africanmusicians—a great geezer show); and while I know that nothing's morehigh-school mawkish than quoting pop music lyrics, the words to"American Tune" keep looping in my head:

...we lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road we're traveling on,
I wonder what's gone wrong
I can't help it—I wonder what's gone wrong.

Life gets weird on the road sometimes.

Writers tend, as everyone knows, toward the introverted, even the claustrophobic. That’s why readings make for such odd performance art.Whereas a half-hour listening even to, say, Bobcat Goldthwait would have its certain appeal--and I’m thinking of the entertainers I’d really least like to see--a novelist isn’t that kind of funambulist; we come by our work through continual and restless alone time. This does wonders for our social skills, lemme tell you: as a breed we get kind of inert,and are most relaxed--even maybe most ourselves --sitting in a room with no one else. And then, to hawk our wares, we’re sent out;we stand before (we hope) a crowded room and perform. (That’s why I mix my “shows” up by bringing audience members to read with me--it gives it a theatrical feel, and is more, I hope, fun. Because--to be honest--most readings are anything but fun…..)

Anyway, back to the weird, the unexpected twists of the road.

In Portland, the gifted writer PaulsToutonghi stopped me on the street before my reading.