Unless It Moves the Human Heart

The New Yorker‘s Book Bench has an excerpt from Roger Rosenblatt’s new book, Unless it Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing, which I paged through the other night at the Yacht Club, where a friend had a copy. It’s not just that I’m a sucker for writing books, which I cravenly am, but that Rosenblatt has been giving expert advice since Rules for Aging: A Wry and Witty Guide to Life (2000), where the first rule is, “Whatever you think matters—doesn’t. Follow this rule and it will add decades to your life.”

I think it matters, though, that I snap up this book, so I’m eyeing the cut-off dates on the last 85 Border’s 40% off coupons gathering dust in my email trash. Unless it Moves… includes a letter Rosenblatt wrote to the students in the graduate writing course he taught at Stony Brook University in 2008; here’s a passage from it:

You must write as if your reader needed you desperately, because he does. If, as Kafka said, a book is an ax for the frozen sea within us, then write with that frozen sea in mind and in view. See your reader, who has fallen through the ice of his own manufacture. You can just make him out, as he flails in slow motion, palms pressed upward under the ice. Here’s your ax. Now, chop away and lift him up by the shoulders. And what do you get out of this act of rescue? You save two people: your reader and yourself. Every life is exposed to things that will ruin it, and often do, for a time. But there is another life inside us that remains invulnerable and glimpses immortality. For the writer that life exists on the page, where it attaches itself to every other life, to all the lives that have been and will be.

Read more: An Inspirational Letter to My Students.

Rosenblatt is the author of Making Toast, a memoir about the loss of his daughter, Amy. There is a wonderful review of it here, by my friend Jessica Handler.

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