Halfway Home

Yeah, I'm talking about Paul Monette's sumptuous masterpiece, written just before he died from AIDS.

I've just finished reading Rough Music, by Patrick Gale, another masterly composition, filled with the soft melancholy of life, and I thought to myself, fuck, why do I bother keeping on writing when I know for a fact that others do it so consummately, so polished, so effing well, and I produce this prose as constipated as a municipal flowerbed outside the municipal shithouse, all salvias and lavenders and overdone roses, with all the originality and talent of a Country Women's Association cake sale? Why?