I'll Never Make Sense Of It, And I'll Never Stop Trying.

I guess one reason I’m doing this work is to try to understand what happened — “what” being any number of moments or relationships or decisions or events but also being the whole thing, the from there to here of it. So I’m grateful to have a trove of primary source material. Letters, manuscripts, journals, assorted artifacts: they’re really the only things I’ve kept.

I’m writing this week about 1983 (sometimes I wonder, when am I ever not writing about 1983?). It’s a difficult time to get my head around, one reason being that — at least within the period I’m covering in my book, which ends roughly at 1990 — I have so much archival material to make sense of. Writing for me is always kind of emotional. I figure if it’s not making me cry or laugh or horny or something I’m probably not doing it right — and especially so with this project which is even more personal than usual.

But sometimes I’ll run across something that’s just too much and I have to call it a day.