Is Writing a Vice?

From an interview with historian and writer Jill Lepore: “The Academy Is Largely Itself Responsible for Its Own Peril: Jill Lepore on writing the story of America, the rise and fall of the fact, and how women’s intellectual authority is undermined” by Evan Goldstein (Chronicle of Higher Education, November 13, 2018):

Q. You get asked about your productivity a lot. I gather it’s a question you don’t like.

A. I sometimes say to people — this is like a 1930s thing to say, you can picture Barbara Stanwyck saying it in a noir film — it’s like complimenting a girl on her personality. It’s not about “You do good work,” it’s about “You do a lot of work.” // For a lot of people writing is an agony; it’s a part of what we do as scholars that they least enjoy. For me writing is a complete and total joy, and if I’m not writing I’m miserable. I have always written a lot. For years, before I wrote for The New Yorker, I wrote an op-ed every day as practice and shoved it in a drawer. It’s not about being published, it’s about the desire to constantly be writing. It’s such a strongly felt need that if it was something socially maladaptive it would be considered a vice.

I’m with her. Read Lepore’s latest book, These Truths. For more of my thoughts on writing see REFLECTIONS.