Ottessa Moshfegh

I put off writing this article for ages. Initially, I decided I would write it from bed, but the temptation of simply giving up and falling asleep again was too great. A change of tactic proved no less helpful: out of bed, it took every ounce of effort I had to avoid getting straight back in again. Not a jot was left over for the exertion of writing and typing. This isn’t the status quo for my productivity, I promise; it is more a reflection of the subject matter. It is absolutely impossible to write about indolence while running around busily ticking off a to-do list. You have to relax into it. Call it method article-writing, if you will. Indolence gets something of a bad rap these days.

It’s hard to move on the literary internet — or that nest of inky vipers, literary Twitter — without coming across a piece that expresses one of two opinions: the first, that men don’t read literary fiction and that this limits their understanding and experience of the world; and the second, that the figure of the heterosexual white man has been crudely and cruelly excluded from the literary debate. “Bring back our Roth, our Amis, our Updike,” these commentators cry, as if they hadn’t received enough acclaim and attention in the past few decades, and if reading them had become illegal rather than just moderately unfashionable.