My neighbor has a phrase she uses whenever I try to complicate something she considers settled. Whenever I offer another angle, introduce a distinction, or question what she calls “common knowledge,” she shrugs and says, “Same difference.” Annoyingly, I might add. I have come to think of her as a Commonist—not a communist, though the resemblance is not entirely accidental. A Commonist believes in the superiority of what “everybody knows.” The group verdict stands. Nuance is s

In painting, photography, or sculpture, the self-portrait has long been considered one of the most fertile artistic forms. We understand, almost instinctively, that such works are not about resemblance in any simple sense. Consider Rembrandt, who painted himself repeatedly as a nobleman, a beggar, an apostle, and a ruined old man. Or Frida Kahlo, who staged herself as martyr or wounded deer, never asking to be read literally. In all these cases, the self is material, not subj

A friend sent me an old photograph. Boulevard du Temple, Paris , by Louis Daguerre, the caption read. Then she added, almost casually, “Taken in 1838, it’s believed to be the earliest photograph showing a living person. Or two, actually, near the bottom left corner. One is clearly visible, apparently having his boots polished; the other is only half-there, blurred by motion.” My friend is an engineer, deeply interested in the history of technology and breakthrough inventions.

With Lucky Me  no longer in my hands and the launch just days away, I took a trip to South America with my wife, traveling through Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. During the first few days, I still found myself thinking about the novel, even working on its translations into Portuguese and Polish. But by the time we reached Patagonia, I finally began to relax. I needed to. And I totally enjoyed it. Climbing the peaks of Torres del Paine, horseback riding with gauchos, tasting vi

Well, not six feet under yet, just dead nervous. The book is out, no longer mine to adjust, protect, or explain. For years, I’ve lived with these pages, rewriting them, defending them from myself, trying to make every sentence sound like something only I could write. Now they belong to others: readers, reviewers, perhaps even a few algorithms. It’s a strange feeling. Friends’ comments never carried this kind of weight. Fellow writers critique, suggest, nod, empathize. Reviewe

After my mother died, I went through her belongings. In an ornamental, wooden box, tucked among her precious cooking recipes and what I took to be my father’s love letters (he was not a man of great sentiment), I found a small, green-covered notebook, a zeszycik do słówek , as we called it in school, the kind used for vocabulary drills. Its pages were filled with handwritten poems. My poems. I remembered writing them, vaguely: the lined pages, the fading blue ink, the care wi

“Sunset.” This is how my friends reacted to my first post, or to the stock picture I attached to it. No question mark, but I could hear the doubt behind the words. Is that how you see your new beginning?  they seemed to be asking, smirking as they said the word. I thought about it for a while. “A matter of perspective,” I said. “The sun also rises. It’s always rising somewhere, even if what we call a sunset looks like an ending.” Hemingway meant something different when he wr

After decades of writing for the drawer, I decided it was time to share some of my stories with people other than a few loyal friends. I gathered a small collection, polished it as best I could, and sent it out to agents and publishers. To my surprise, one respected agent—just one, out of dozens—wanted to see more. In this business, that counts as success. Most of the replies were the standard “not for my list,” which is publishing shorthand for “good luck elsewhere.” I sent