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That Which Is Most Personal Is Most Common
 
 
I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden
 
 
By the time I passed thirty, I got it: I was not going to be a writer. Sure, I had impressed my sixth-grade teacher with my heroic dog stories, but now I couldn’t finish anything without balling it up in discouragement. So I did the next best thing and went after a job in a related field. I interviewed to be a copy editor at San Francisco Focus, the local city magazine, swearing to the managing editor that I wasn’t a writer, that my happiness lay in making sure that the absence of “h” in Natan Katzman’s name in the masthead was not an error.
I got the job. Pleased to my rope sandals to be hired at a real magazine, I proofread, fact-checked, and coded manuscripts for the typesetter. I sweated over the captions that came my way as if they were War and Peace, and wrote headlines such as “Swell Wines at Swill Prices” (which they rejected, the cowards). I called up writers to say things like, “Listen to this paragraph and see if you can live without the last two sentences.” I told myself it was terrific to be an editor, enjoying all those lunches out and wearing all those black outfits. All the time, though, I yearned to be one of the writers who came and went at odd hours, looking as if they had tramp streamers moored outside, or who had just left wintry palaces, and gave us their copy to edit.
My friend Cynthia, the production editor, wanted to be a writer as much as I did. She was as thin as a butter knife and wore her sweaters d