The fact that I haven’t read many books about writing has always made me feel a little guilty. I think I’ve only ever finished one book about writing, Stephen King’s On Writing.

When I first started taking writing classes at The Loft, I thought I might be some sort of defective reject. A lot of my fellow classmates would extol the virtues of this writing book or that writing book. They’d talk about how how inspired they were by these books. There was no way in hell I could admit that I didn’t have the stomach for Bird by Bird, and I hadn’t even heard of Writing Down the Bones. I was kind of aghast. Did writers really read all these books about writing? Was I some kind of poser for not reading them? Surely I would be kicked out of class for being such a bad student.

Then one of my teachers (either Dale or the Vodo) made a point about how your time might be better spent reading great books rather than books about writing. It put my mind at ease, and even though I have a shelf filled with unread writing books, I don’t worry about it so much anymore.

So it was with a little trepidation that I downloaded the audio version of Jonathan Franzen’s How to Be Alone from Audible. The title has intrigued me for ages. It smacks of self-helpness (a genre that makes me the shiver in horror), and yet I couldn’t resist. I put off my curiousity for a long while because I spied a copy of the book at Barnes & Noble once, shoved in with a bunch of other books about writing. Bleh.

I’m only a few essays in, but the one called “Why Bother” (rewritten from something he published in Harper’s back in 1998) has left me wandering around aimlessly in my head. I can’t seem to stop thinking about it.

In the essay, Franzen talks about the death of the social novel and blah, blah, blah. It’s all very interesting for nerds like me. But what has kind of struck me like lightning was what he wrote about Shirley Heath Brice a linguistic anthropologist who did a study on people who read serious fiction.

During her research, Heath found there are two types of people who read serious fiction as adults. Those who were brought up to read serious fiction because their parents read it, and those who discovered books as a way to escape from the world they didn’t fit into, the social isolates. (An aside: Heath also found that in the East serious fiction reading was a class thing and in the Midwest it was more a protestant thing — good people do not spend their time frivolously and therefore used it to read books).

Heath said that social isolates are more inclined to become writers because writing was the medium of communication from their childhood. When isolates grow up they find writing vital to their sense of connectedness.

Find writing vital to their sense of connectedness. I just need to repeat that. Because that’s how I feel about writing. I have often said that sometimes I feel like things haven’t finished happening, or that I haven’t fully experienced them until I write about them — whether it be writing it on the Web, in a short story, or in a personal journal. I need that written word as a connection to my experience.

I could weep with the eurekaness of this moment.

Franzen talks about how when Heath said to him, “you are a socially isolated individual who desperately wants to communicate with a substantive imaginary world” he felt as though she had seen his very soul.

Amen, Mr. Franzen, amen.