Hilton Als on First Books

I think that most first books or projects that are more ambitious than magazine articles tend to be about the writer himself. The writer is trying to discover what he sounds like after many years of apprenticeship, imitation, and so on. There are two things going on in my book. One is the ostensible subject, which is listening to a particular kind of feminine presence that doesn’t usually have a voice in the world, and the issue of me trying to let them speak without too much control. And then there’s also the simultaneous issue of my trying to learn how to speak, not just for other people, as in my reporting or memoir-type writing, but learning to speak for myself.