La mort de l’auteur

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. Reviewers, on the other hand, like. Or they don’t. They have thumbs and stars, and their quick verdicts echo in public.

Roland Barthes wrote about this in 1967. “La mort de l’auteur,” he called it. The death of the author. He meant that once a story finds its way into the world, the writer’s intentions no longer matter.The text stands on its own, interpreted and reinvented by every reader. I suspect Barthes wasn’t waiting for Goodreads ratings when he said it, but the idea holds.

So here I am, not yet buried, but experiencing a small literary death, the kind that happens when you stop being the author and become just another reader.

If you happen to meet Lucky Me out there, be kind to it. It’s all yours now.