Epilogue

October 31, 2070. I tell the doorman about who I am here to see, and he calls upstairs, and he tells me go to the 35th floor, and I do, and I arrive at the elderly writer’s penthouse. I knock on his door and he lets me in. He walks with a slight hunch, and a cane. His hair is decidedly gray. We sit down outside on his private balcony, as it is a very mild Halloween. We begin the interview.
TPR: At what time of the day do you write?
JK: Whenever I find the time. Whenever it makes sense to be writing. Whenever I have nothing else to do. Whenever I get stoned, and am alone, and need to talk to someone. Once I camped next to a girl at a music festival who told me that she got too social when she smoked, so much that she would talk to herself when she got stoned alone. I could identify with that.
TRP: Do you have any tips for young writers?
JK: You should mine your personal life for material. You should be as bombastic about it as possible. The writer is the only modern god. Well, the writer and the director. But the writer certainly has more power than the director. The writer has the ability to elevate himself or herself to the level of god or goddess. The director has the ability to portray that elevation in whatever light he chooses, and he or she gets to order a lot of people around, but the writer works alone, and can say whatever he or she chooses.
TRP: You speak extremely politically correctly.
JK: I have learned that women will destroy men for all time, from here on in, forever. They wield the power here, and we must be very careful not to upset their relative serenity and open up the heart of the beast that lurks within.
TRP: Are you working on anything now?
JK: I am writing reflections on the art of literature, the lessons I have learned. At this time it is too late for me to begin another novel. I am not sure I will be conscious at this next time year, and I don’t want to start something I can’t finish. For now I am working on short essays on literature, and I will write as many as I can until I become physically infirm. Hopefully it will be a fat little volume. You don’t write a million words and then not give anyone advice on how to get that far.
TRP: Is there any work you are more proud of than the others?
JK: Betrayal, Betrayal was a very difficult one for me to write, because it involved a lot of libelous claims. Let me make clear: everything in that book is true—everything in that book really happened. The libelous claims come from those whose names were changed. I could not change their physical characteristics because it would have made it less true—the only thing that was changed were their names, enough to protect them, but enough to let them know I meant them. I put myself on a scaffold there, Scarlet Letter-style, but I did it because I knew it would make for a powerful piece of literature, and most people consider it my greatest contribution to the canon. I am very embarrassed by it, and it should rather be considered young adult fiction, not unlike Catcher in the Rye, literature, but not especially hoity-toity literature.
TRP: What about your biggest disappointment?
JK: Daylight Savings Time. I worked on it for two years. I told everyone I was writing a novel. They were all intrigued, but I could tell they didn’t think it would be very good. Maybe they didn’t feel that way, but I guess I did, so I projected my feelings onto them. Sometimes when people would ask me what I did, I would tell them that I worked for my dad, because that’s what I was doing as I was writing it, and they would start acting bored, so then I would say, “But that’s not my passion. I’m writing a novel right now too,” and they would get more interested and they would say, “What’s it about?” and I would give them some kind of basic runaround, like, “It’s about Chicago,” or “It’s about ten characters in Chicago,” or “there’s lots of drugs in it” or “it’s about acceptable behavior versus unacceptable behavior” or “it’s about relationships” or “it’s a sociological thriller” or “it’s very metafictional” or “it’s about present day people in their early 20’s” and they’d either start to seem bored, or they would say, “Wow, sounds interesting.” Then they would ask for a copy, and read it, and feel strangely ambivalent about it, strangely ambivalent about all the time they spent reading through it, searching for something, something they could tell me to improve on, something they could tell me delete, something they could tell me to expand upon, something beautiful they could compliment me on, something embarrassing they could tease me about, some problem of continuity that rendered the entire piece moot, some problem of connectivity, some problem of consistency, some issue ignored, some topic excessively and exhaustively mined, some laughable characteristic, some unrealistic exchange of dialogue, some inauthentic emotion, some inauthentic reaction, some instance of bad taste, some instance of insensitivity, some truth I failed to communicate adequately.

THE END