Q: Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, Cherry, and Lit: A Memoir weren’t YA novels. They were memoirs.
A: Hick Lit is a series of three memoirs.
But it’s autobiographical fiction.
They are immobilized hero novels.
I am immobilized in Point and Shoot.
Q: Why are you immobilized?
A: Old age.
I don’t get out much anymore.
I don’t leave my writing room.
Plus, it’s just modern times.
The modern hero is immobilized.
Man writing about man writing immobilizes you. There’s no market for it, or a very small market for it. Not being able to sell it, you have to work, and working and writing both immobilizes you.
Nobody can work and write both for decades. You get fired for blogging and blacklisted. You can’t get hired.
Q: You did.
A: Look what doing that did to me.
It made me obsessed with my predicament.
I lost the innocence Nelson Algren says a writer needs to write a proper novel. The belief that if he writes it, it will be published.