In Search of Rebecca

The hard questions usually have no simple answers. For me, writing stories is the best means of dealing with difficult questions of ethics, morality, and philosophy. In confronting perplexing questions in my fiction and poetry, I’ve achieved an odd kind of success. Often, I have no idea how to formulate the question, let alone the answer, before I struggle with it through the process of writing. The writing then becomes the avenue into the complex nature of the question itself. If I come out of the process with a clearer sense of the question, and with no answer—which is more often the case than not—I am satisfied. That’s the odd success. I stopped, for example, asking, “Is there a God?” by age twenty-one, after which everything, in Gide’s words, seemed “downhill.”...