Book review: “The Writing Life” by Annie Dillard

One of the many things I liked about Annie Dillard’s 1989 nonfiction book The Writing Life is her discussion of how writers choose what they write, how they should choose.  She writes:

People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all…

Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it’s up to you…

Thoreau said it another way: know your own bone. “Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life…Know your own bone: gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, gnaw at it still.”

Another thing she says is this:

It should surprise no one that the life of the writer — such as it is — is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation.  Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.

Repudiated

As a reader, it’s hard for me to know how to think about The Writing Life after making a visit to Dillard’s website.

There, she includes a long piece about her that was written, apparently in 2010, by her husband Robert D. Richardson, the author of highly esteemed biographies of Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James.

Richardson, who died in 2020, characterizes The Writing Life as “a book [Dillard] repudiates except for the last chapter, the true story of stunt pilot Dave Rahm. The piece spirals and dives in a narrative flight that is both heart-stopping and metaphorical; any good writer is a stunt pilot.”

Even so, Dillard includes The Writing Life in the website’s list of her fifteen books. She quotes high praise from the Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune but describes the book as “an embarrassing nonfiction narrative fixed somewhat and republished by Harper Perennial 1998.”

I’ve compared the two editions, and, except for a sentence here and there added or subtracted in the book’s first chapter, I can’t find any differences.

“The poet is working”

I’m not sure what it means to repudiate a book. I’m not sure what Dillard means about fixing the narrative.

I do know that I liked some sentences on page 15.  Dillard writes:

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.  These truths comfort the anguished. They do not mean, by any means, that faster-written books are worse books. They just mean that most writers might well stop berating themselves for writing at a normal, slow pace.

Octavio Paz cites the example of “Saint-Pol Roux, who used to hang the inscription ‘The poet is working’ from his door while he slept.”

“Without a splash”

The stunt pilot stuff in the seventh and last chapter is good.  As Richardson wrote, “any good writer is a stunt pilot.” So, Dillard’s story about Rahm underlines the risks that writers have to take with the writing of every sentence.

Still, Rahm died when a stunt went wrong. Writers don’t die because a sentence comes out clunky. Or, maybe, that’s the risk. That you spend your life trying to create art but, in the end, fail, a kind of slow-motion crash-and-burn. Of course, all art is doomed to fail. It’s the nature of the thing.

Another seeming metaphor for the riskiness of writing is Dillard’s account of seeing a heavy-bodied moth panting on the rail of a ship. She explains that it was a sphinx moth with a thick body and tiny wings, often mistaken for a hummingbird. The only way a sphinx moth can fly is by supercharging the flight muscles with oxygen, so it needs to rev up before take off.

She watched it revving up, walked away, came back and it was still revving.

Maybe I scared it. After trembling so violently that it seemed it must blow apart, the moth took flight. Its wings blurred, like a hummingbird’s. It flew a few yards out over the water before it began losing altitude. It was going down. Its wings buzzed; it gained height and lost, gained and lost, and always lost more than it gained, until its heavy body dragged in the water, and it drowned before my eyes without a splash.

“Incoherently as usual”

One of my favorite sentences in Dillard’s book came from “mad Jacob Boehme” in a section in which she is describing what it feels like to write a book:

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of rearing and peering from the bent tip of a grassblade, looking for a route. At its absurd worst, it feels like what mad Jacob Boehme, the German mystic, described in his first book. He was writing, incoherently as usual, about the source of evil. The passage will serve as well for the source of books.

“The whole Deity has in its innermost or beginning Birth, in the Pith or Kernel, a very tart, terrible Sharpness, in which the astringent Quality is very horrible, tart, hard, dark and cold Attraction or Drawing together, like Winter, when there is a fierce, bitter cold Frost, when Water is frozen into Ice, and besides is very intolerable.”

I like the incoherence there. And I like the mysticism.

Patrick T. Reardon

7.15.25