Louis during my senior year, I handed him my copy of How to Be Alone and asked for advice about becoming a writer. When I finally met Franzen at a book signing in St. I was coming to understand what words can do. Many of the 14 essays in How to Be Alone, by the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Corrections, first appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, and elsewhere. Reading Franzen’s essays about his father’s ordeal with Alzheimer’s, or about packing up his childhood bedroom, I felt the shock of recognition. How To Be Alone - Essays - Jonathan Franzen - Vintage Paperback Book - Pre-Owned Used - Very Good Condition. Jonathan Franzen is smart and brash, the kind of person you want as your social critic but not as a brother-in-law. My dad and I had just moved my grandparents from the house they’d lived in for 30 years, and I was coming to realize that I would not always be young. At the time, my grandfather was battling Alzheimer’s. Franzen’s literary arguments were lost on me, but his personal reflections were not.

Louis its author was Jonathan Franzen.Įnthralled, I picked up How to Be Alone. It concerned a shy and sensitive young man’s high school years in St. Louis, recognizing me as a slightly shy and sensitive young man, had pointed me to an essay he thought I’d like. An English teacher at my high school in St. In other words: before I knew much about literature, or why it matters. I first read How to Be Alone, a collection of essays by Jonathan Franzen, when I was 15-before I knew who William Gaddis was, or could define “postmodernism,” or understood the difference between realism and experimentalism.

How to be alone franzen