By the last page of my last novelmustwin, the doubts had become a certainty: I couldn’t keep writing fiction.
I’ve ridden a remarkable trajectory: growing up in the prehistoric era before Wi-Fi and stumbling into midlife during the panicky present, when so much from the before-times has dissolved. My first novel, “The Imperfectionists,” was a best seller when I was in my mid-30s. But as tech blipped and beeped and barged in, I watched contemporary fiction lose relevance each year. Or maybe it was just my novels. Anyway, I had decades more. Could I become something else?
So last year, in my late 40s, I enrolled alongside 20-somethings in a master’s program at the London School of Economics to study the science of behavioral change while attempting behavioral change on myself. This plot twist — writer to student — proved more disorienting than I’d expected. It resuscitated me, yet tested my pride.
The experience also exposed a mistake that many of us make. I’d glued my dignity to my occupation, and it was a struggle to pry them apart. I suspect that many people will agonize over this during the coming A.I. transformation, which may overhaul jobs and eliminate entire occupations. But these changes also present many of us with an opportunity: to ditch the wounding notion that we each must find a calling, then retain that identity or admit failure. Perhaps the dignified life involves several versions of you.
Or this is what I told myself, wandering around campus with my fire-engine-red backpack, living scenes from a comic novel about a middle-aged fool. “You’re faculty,” the security guard said, as I searched for the new-student mixer.
“No, the faculty are much younger,” I explained, flashing my student ID, and puffing up the stairs to a room packed with others starting my program. At the threshold, I hesitated in pre-mingle, that condition of wince-smiling because you don’t know these people and must launch yourself at them.
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