“When in doubt, channel your inner Fran Lebowitz. Obviously there’s a certain irony in suggesting that the cure for writer’s block is to channel the person who’s known for being among the most famously blocked writers of our time. But for me, Fran Lebowitz is not just a personal cultural and literary hero. She’s a kind of pacemaker for the brain. Sometimes when I’m at a loss for words or ideas, I type her name into YouTube and select any one of dozens of videos in which she holds forth on some subject or another. There’s Fran on young writers (‘I have no interest in them.’), Fran on Jane Austen (‘I don’t think she’s popular for the right reasons.’), Fran on work ethics (‘I am the most slothful person you’ll probably ever meet.’) There are clips from the wonderful documentary Martin Scorsese made about her in 2010 and from interviews with David Letterman dating back as far as 1978. When I say Fran is a pacemaker, what I mean is that she speaks with such total authority—with such an absence of apology or hesitation or equivocation—that her voice lodges into my head and helps me to stop apologizing and hesitating. Her confidence is infectious. She reminds us that an author’s task, quite literally, is to exercise authority. Of course, the ‘inner Fran Lebowitz’ doesn’t literally have to be Fran Lebowitz. Everyone, if they’re lucky, has their own version of Fran, someone whose voice and pulse are strong enough to jumpstart their own. The key is in remembering to seek it out when you need it—in other words, giving yourself permission to do something other than write. Which Fran, for one, would approve of.”
—Meghan Daum, author of The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014)
Photo credit: Alan Zarembo