10th
Wanting to meet an author is to me akin to lingering over a record cover or a movie poster; most authors, like any kinds of artist, aspire to give us their best and deepest selves in their books. In life, or on the surface, they’re often as scattered and unremarkable and superficial as the rest of us.
With Greene, moreover, I always felt that I could have the most intimate conversations with him on the page, in silence. He read me perfectly without ever seeing me. Were I to have met him, it’s not just that the public Greene might not have matched the unflinching soul I met on the page; it’s that that surface self, making small talk, might actually detract from, and would certainly complicate, the soul beneath the personality I regularly met in the books.
