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Blogs by Jack Gunthridge
Life and Love 12/23/2008 9:32:09 PM
Thoughts on my current state. It has been weird lately. I have had lots of people wondering about me. I have been getting praised as a writer. It's not that I don't like praise. I love it. I mean, who doesn't like getting their ego stroked? But I seem to have lost a bit of myself in the praise. People are seeing me in ways that I don't see myself. They are trying to force me to be something that they envision me to be.
I don't consider myself a literary genius. My book might be a literary masterpiece, but I never set out to accomplish this. Writing a book was just a random thought that I had one day. I turned a screenplay into a novel in hopes of trying to get the screenplay produced.
I don't like being labeled as the hope of literature or even having written a literary masterpiece. Do you know the pressure that puts on somebody? If my book is good, that's one thing. But to have your work looked at something that is supposed to influence the future of an art form is another.
When I look in the mirror, I see myself the way I have always seen myself. I think I am a normal human being. I have thoughts and feelings like everybody else. I just put my thoughts down for the rest of the world to see. I have never shied away from anything I have thought or felt. I figure that if I have felt it, then somebody else has, too.
I had somebody recently tell me that the only person they could compare me to was J.D. Salinger, but that they liked my work better. So now I kind of have to operate in that realm of authors. It's like I'm expected to be some high brow intellectual. It's not that I have anything against intellectuals, or that I don't want to be one. I have never wanted to have people think that I was stupid. I have always just wanted to be accessible to people. There is a love for humanity in me.
The intellectual thing bothers me because I have always considered myself a comedian. I know I have a romantic edge to my work. What can I say? I have never found a girl yet who has broken my heart enough to cure me of my ridiculous obsession with love and all of its glory. And this is what bothers me about how people are receiving my work. They are crying.
I'm a comedian, people. You're not supposed to cry at my work. They have laughed at it as well, but they talk about the crying. I have had three different people tell me that they cried. I don't think I even went to that place inside of me that would make other people cry while writing this book. Sometimes I do mean to make people cry, but I don't think I did with this book. This book is a comedy that describes the beauty of love. Maybe it was too beautiful. I could see people crying at that. I could also see people laughing until they cried. But I can't see people crying because I made them feel the pain of one of my characters.
I don't know. I'm going to continue to do what I've always done. I will define myself and not let the world define me. I can't live up to what I think other people's expectations of me are. At the end of the day, I have to be the one that has to look at myself in the mirror. I don't want to look in the mirror and not like what I see.
