(Guest post by Debra Spark)

This will be a celebration of a writer I love that begins with what I am weary of: narratives in which other people are the problem. This is because I am weary of people who cast others as the problem, when that very tendency is the problem. If we cannot see the harm we have done, as well as the harm that has been done to us, we cannot see. As a writer and as a person, I’m interested in what seems truer: shame, self-analysis, owning your own crap.

This mini-rant leads me to one of my favorite books, William Maxwell’s autobiographical novel So Long, See You Tomorrow. The author-narrator are one and the same in this book, and the only person Maxwell really blames is himself, and this even though the story concerns a murder.