Tell me your secrets, six-toed cats
Pop quiz: At what famous dead writer’s house can you find more than 50 cats, about half of which have six-toed paws? Recently I had the opportunity to visit Ernest Hemingway’s home on Key West, where he lived for most of the 1930s—and fostered a population of cats all descended from one six-toed tom.
The house is a gorgeous historic affair with generous porches, a preposterously expensive swimming pool, and an airy writing studio with a surprisingly uncomfortable-looking desk. This turns out to be, according to my tour guide, the most popular tourist attraction in all of the Florida Keys. It got me wondering: Why do we have such an obsession with the innerworkings of the lives of successful artists?
Ever since I started writing for a living, I have been particularly interested in the lives of successful writers. I can distract myself for hours with interviews and advice from literary luminaries. There’s an almost mollifying effect to immersing myself in the details of their rituals, habits, and superstitions—as if learning what they did or do exonerates me from figuring it for myself. (I have also noticed that this kind of investigation is now directed at me. Hmm.) But after reading so many of these things, I realize that the one unifying theme to all of them is that successful writers don’t wholly follow any pattern or path set out by anyone else. Therein lies their success. When it comes to the writing life, may we all become our own experts.