the easter parade by richard yates

richard yates was a depressed man who drank a lot, his novel 'the easter parade' starts by saying that neither of the two sisters, the two main characters in the novel, would ever be happy

it ends with one sister dead, maybe killed by her husband, and the other sister telling her dead sister's son that it's funny that she's almost fifty and still has not understood anything in her life

i felt a little good after reading this book because i am pretty sure that when i am almost fifty i will also not understand anything in my life, it's good to know that i am not alone in this

i believe that richard yates also, at fifty, the age he was when the book was published, did not understand anything in his life, which is why he kept on drinking and ended up dying alone in a house with a personal oxygen tank

i think he probably wrote the book with sisters instead of brothers because people would have been said things like 'what kind of man cries all the time and doesn't understand anything at age fifty and cries about it'

which somehow makes me want to talk about this article, What kind of Latino am I?, on salon, by daniel alarcon

in the article, daniel is irritated that people want to know about his parents, if his parents are poor latinos or illegal immigrants

I have come to feel I am disappointing certain people when I say I grew up in the suburbs.

i don't know what daniel is talking about, i feel that 'of course he is disappointing some people'

because he writes about people who did not grow up in the suburbs, who did not go to an expensive college, people who are not him

some people are disappointed because, given the choice, and they are given the choice, they would rather read about the third-world from someone who grew up in the third-world than from someone who grew up in the suburbs 'obviously'

It's about making things up, isn't it? Don't all writers -- regardless of race, gender, age, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, native tongue, national identity, social class -- don't we all attempt to write about people who are not ourselves? And how boring would it be if we didn't?

i feel like daniel is being naive or something

to answer daniel's questions, 'no, not all writers attempt to write about people who are not themselves' and 'i don't know how boring it would be, probably not as boring as if everyone wrote about things they didn't experience'

richard yates said he only writes about failures, people who fail in life, never about people who are succesful

When we should be judged on the basis of our ability to imagine worlds and empathize with our characters, we are instead reduced to merely representing that which we must surely know firsthand.

he said 'we should' without saying why, he didn't say the effects of not doing so and the effects of doing so and then type things saying why one of those effects is 'better' than the other

'what is he talking about'

'not everyone in the world is the same'

i am a person and i don't read a book to judge and congratulate the writer, but to feel connected to another human being

and i don't feel like i can (as effectively) feel connected to you if you're making up characters who are not you, who have not had the same experiences as you, who are deliberately not you, than if you are writing about yourself

but other people, i know, are different than me

i'm not saying it's 'bad' that you are good at 'imagining worlds'

just that me personally would rather read something by someone who does less of 'imagining worlds'

people are different, they read for different reasons, and it is 'impossible' for anyone to logically 'should' anything unless contexts, perspectives, and goals have been defined