A Love Affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald

I was required to read The Great Gatsby in high school, like approximately every other American human being. I read it begrudgingly, and I didn't like it. What's the point? I remember thinking to myself with a condescending sniff as I sat there in my English class. Who cares about these people and their silly lives? Who cares about this rich guy's obsessive love for Daisy, who sounds kind of flighty and irritating anyway? And what's the big deal about her voice? Boring.

About two years ago I began a mission to read the classics I'd missed, or re-read the ones I had read when I was too young to understand them. I started with this one, and when I say it walloped me what I mean is that F. Scott Fitzgerald himself stood up and punched me repeatedly in the face with his magnificence. I gasped out loud at many sentences, re-reading the same paragraphs over and over as I tried to understand his way of weaving things together. Every single freaking word is perfect and right and the whole thing is just stitched together with a weird atmosphere of party lights and alcoholism and a leaking, desperate sadness.

I read it on an airplane, traveling south. I had a pencil and I underlined the crap out of it, moment after moment, which is a thing I never do to books. I finished it with a bang and immediately started it over again. I know it's fiction, but the atmosphere of the story is so true and visceral I felt like I could reach in and somehow dance my way right into it. That's the magic, to me - knowing that every part of Fitzgerald's imagination was born from his reality. The world he wrote from was real and actual. The events were manufactured, but the world was his true life, and he captured it for me, for everyone, and through some crazy veil of time and chance and typographic trickery I can see it too.

I know everyone knows this book is greatness, of course. I'm just feeling a bit effusive about it on an otherwise inoffensive Saturday, and wanted to share after bumping into this letter he wrote to a young aspiring writer. I want to tattoo it onto my hands.

PS: I know I am behind on real posts. My sincere apologies to the random five people who are reading this. The summer has run away with me, but I'm getting back on track now.