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I. The Heart Wants What It Wants

Sometime during the pandemic, I decided I’d never watch Manhattan again. I told a friend, and in celebration we rattled off a list of the movie’s most objectionable scenes.

There’s the one where Woody Allen, in the rage-throttled voice of the recently rejected incel, tells Diane Keaton he doesn’t need her to remind him that he’s funny. The one where he does a piss-poor job of trying to convince Meryl Streep that he wasn’t trying to run her and her lesbian partner over with his car. The one where he and Michael Murphy argue over who has sexual rights to Diane Keaton. “You think you’re God!” Murphy spits, to which Allen responds: “I’ve got to model myself after someone.”

And then there’s the film’s pièce de résistance: Tracy, the seventeen-year-old Woody Allen’s character is sleeping with. Tracy’s arc runs like this: she’s in love with Allen’s Isaac Davis, who grooms her and then dumps her only to try to win her back again as she’s on her way to study acting in London.

I’ve often wondered about the details of Tracy’s life outside of Isaac’s influence. Where did she go and what did she do when she wasn’t on camera in the male fantasyland of Manhattan? Did she tell her friends about Isaac? Her parents? How did she feel after the sex with a man old enough to be her father? Did she call someone after Isaac dumped her in the diner, or was she too ashamed? Did she keep Isaac’s desire for her a secret during her time in London?

As it turns out, I know little about what it’s like to be a seventeen-year-old girl in the New York of 1979. But I know a good deal about what it’s like to be a seventeen-year-old girl, and a twenty-two-year-old one. I know how it feels to worry that you’re not doing or saying the right things, how intoxicating it is to have both your entire life ahead of you and the autonomy to ruin it completely.

I know how it feels to work very hard to please others with the hope that this will somehow count as pleasing yourself. It’s a gruelling highwire act, the kind that ends all at once and with little fanfare. You crash to the ground, humiliation roaring in your ears, and look up only to realise that the show has gone on, that yours was not the relevant performance. All you ever were was a silent prop in the epic story of a great man’s becoming.

Like Tracy, I once mistook myself for the protagonist of my own life. It happened when I was an MFA student fresh out of college. I was writing a novel that my mentor, a middle-aged novelist who’d published several books to acclaim, told me he loved. He was writing a novel of his own and it was proving difficult. His candour about this struck me as an act of bravery: if a writer that accomplished still agonised over his work, then surely there was hope for a beginner like me. Before graduating, I slid my unruly manuscript into his campus mailbox and never heard from him about it. I believed it was because he led a busy and important life.

I, too, wanted to live a busy and important life. But that was not the reason it took me over a decade to read his novel—the one he’d been struggling to finish. When I finally did, I was shocked to discover weird little fragments of myself in it. I’d been the latest in a series of props for him. Maid, midwife, washrag wrung dry—less a novelist in my own right than a walking reminder of our strange world and the great man’s duty to make sense of it all on paper.

Recently, a screenwriter asked me what I thought a remake of Manhattan would look like from Tracy’s point of view. The question was enough to make me want to watch the movie again.

II. It Was His Town, and Always Would Be

I was sitting on my dorm room bed when I received a call from the MFA director, well-loved by those who’d graduated from the program. Her voice was full of enthusiasm, and had I not been sweating and pacing and struggling to stifle little screams of joy, I might have registered the slight hitch of concern in her tone: Oh, you’re a senior in college…right now? Yes, I told her. Yes, I was going to graduate in June, and those pages I’d applied with were from an old novel, one I’d decided not to write after all. I was working on something much better now, and I couldn’t wait to share it with her. I’d applied to four programs and gotten into two and this was one. Wasn’t that just utterly unbelievable, totally incredible?

She said she looked forward to meeting me and my new novel in the fall. I thanked her several times. When we hung up, I called my parents. Then I went to the dorm common room with its lumpen couches and smudged plexiglass windows and told my friends. Thrilled squeals. Triumphant posts to social media. My phone blinking for hours afterward with my family’s exuberant texts.

I felt destiny gathering like a magic dust at my feet. I knew that soon it would sweep me up entirely, spirit me off to the world of art and ideas, a place that was never mundane, a place where people were transformed by dint of their hard work and genius into historical figures. This was what I wanted above all else: to be great, to transcend the loathsome, suburban existence of the anxious girl I suspected I was, the one in pit-stained t-shirts and craft-scissored cutoffs who’d been struggling to solve the problem of ordinariness (hers, the world’s) with boyfriends and boxed wine and anorexia and bong rips on the roofs of academic buildings. A yawning maw of need had opened wide within me, something dark and insatiable, and I was still young enough to think I could feed it. My new plan was failproof: I would go to this writing program and write a book that important people would deem great, and then I’d feel much better. It was a process simple enough to be explained in a few bullet points.

Two months later, I arrived on campus. The director greeted me warmly, repeating her compliments about my application. The other students were brilliant and worldly, many carrying the imprimatur of previous publications and Ivy League degrees. Was I as good as they were? Did I have to distinguish myself somehow? Was that even possible?

The assignment of our first-year fellowships and teaching assistantships provided a readily accessible hierarchy. Are you on fellowship? Oh, sorry—what are you teaching, then? Gen Ed Lit meant something, Intro Creative Writing something else. We stood on the front lawn of our program’s academic building, each of us trying to calculate our value to the program. The director floated among us, dispensing her cheerful greetings. She had once played this game too, a long time ago. Later on, she would assure us that it was not a fun game to play, that we should do our best to avoid it altogether and focus on our creativity instead.

In 2012, I had no clue about the strange calculus involved in running a graduate program for creative writers, the brutality of academic groupthink, the sheer volume of administrative tidying and laundering typically heaped upon any program’s female faculty. In 2012, all I knew was that I had a nice fellowship, and that the director’s praise felt good to hear—especially when she told me that one of her colleagues hoped very much to see me in his workshop. He was a man well-known for his precisely observed short stories. So surgical was his precision that he’d actually considered a career in the biological sciences before becoming a writer.

At the end of my first semester, I was invited to a house party whose hosts would both go on to win major literary prizes. In a babydoll dress with a Peter Pan collar, full of far more red wine than I should’ve been, I told one of the hosts what the director had told me about her surgically precise colleague.

The host blinked rapidly, sipping from his half-empty tumbler. “Definitely don’t take that dude’s workshop.”

“Why?” What I wanted to say was: Why would any sane human not sprint headlong in the direction of flattery?

“He’s just, like, a big-time traditionalist. Sneers at genre, practically forbids it. And he has these tedious Rules for Fiction. Villainously retrograde.”

I was confused. The host had read my work, and I’d read his. By then, we’d spoken several times about what we were writing and wanted to write. He knew I didn’t write genre fiction, and neither did he.

“Just don’t do it,” he said.

I wonder if he was trying to protect me. And if so, whether he knew exactly what he was protecting me from.

III. First, Do No Harm

Manhattan is famously set to the soaring jazz of George Gershwin, one of many decisions on Woody Allen’s part well-calculated to transform his favourite city into a character in its own right. Though Gershwin was the immigrant son of Russian Jews, his music is full of American bravado: his piano trills playfully—even seductively—before erupting into dramatic bursts powerful enough to make any man standing on the banks of the East River think twice about jumping in, writing a vengeful novel, or seeking redemption in the arms of the wrong woman. Gershwin knew a thing or two about that last one. As a nine-year-old child, he bragged to his best friend and future biographer about his sexual escapades; by adulthood, the composer was well-known as a kink-obsessed playboy whose only stable relationship was a decade-long affair with the married composer Kay Swift.

Gershwin pairs well with the Manhattan skyline but not very well with dialogue—there’s no melody in two men trying to talk over each other. So his bombastic piano softens into textureless lounge music for the scene in Elaine’s, the famous New York hangout where forty-two-year-old Isaac introduces teenaged Tracy to his adult friends over drinks.

When Tracy excuses herself to the restroom, Isaac wrings his hands. I’m older than her father, he says. Can you believe that? I’m dating a girl wherein I can beat up her father. His friends tell Isaac that he’s drunk, and should never drink. When Tracy comes back, it’s to tell everyone that she and Isaac ought to leave, because she has an exam to study for. Isaac hangs his head and laughs. She’s got homework. I’m dating a girl who does homework. What a glorious and absurd thing, this life! What incomparable joy, to freely indulge one’s fetish in public!

A Rule for Nonfiction: If you are a man powerful and magnetic enough, and the girl in question is naïve and needy enough, engineering her affection will be like trapping a kitten in a cardboard box. All things being equal, she won’t stand a goddamn chance.

Because I’d been warned against it, I did not take the surgically precise man’s workshop the second semester of my first year, nor the first semester of my second. Eventually, I received an email from him out of the blue. He, writer of bestsellers and winner of literary awards, was wondering if I’d consider him to be my thesis advisor? He’d been “blown away” by my second-year fellowship application, and he’d love to chat about it more over coffee. The great dark maw yawned open to receive these tokens of flattery. What harm could come from one coffee?

We met at a place not far from campus. I’d seen him at events before, but never up close. It was clear that when he’d been young, he’d had an easy, athletic handsomeness that probably made him popular at the various elite universities from which he held degrees. But his looks were not the point now, nor were mine. He was happily married, a father, and I was a kid not much older than his own. The point was my talent. My incredible, gobsmacking talent. I’d been right to suspect that the new novel I was working on was much better than the one I’d applied with. He loved it.

“You know, we read these second-year fellowship submissions blind,” he said. “So when I read that chapter of yours about the coked-up Midwestern patriarch—my god, I thought it had to have been written by some white guy my age in recovery. Imagine my shock when I saw it was written by a twenty-two-year-old girl!”

If I could have paused time right then and played the tape forward, past the point where I would eventually relent and take his workshop, past the point where our conversations would grow more confessional, past the point where he would become my mentor and thesis advisor, I would have noticed a glaring inconsistency. Whenever the topic of writing across experience or identity came up in his workshop, my mentor would not only encourage but celebrate it, identifying such “flexibility” as a critical feature of literary fiction, the kind that carries within it that rare power to kindle a reader’s empathy. A reader ought to be made to feel for a character regardless of whether the character is similar to the writer, or whether they behave ‘well’ or ‘badly’. In fact, that was a Rule for Fiction: The best stories are the ones in which characters behave badly! Write what you don’t know, he told us. Do your research and live adventurously to close the gap.

These remarks would feel odd to me, so different from those of the cheerfully incredulous professor who couldn’t figure out how this young student had managed such an impossible feat of subjective insight. But of course, such things weren’t mine to understand. The girl doesn’t play the tape forward, after all. She doesn’t frame the shot, she doesn’t write the script. She just shows up to her mark and does as she’s told.

IV. Show, Don’t Tell

Let’s say that after Isaac dumps Tracy in the diner, she goes home and calls her best friend, who invites her over. The friend’s parents are out of town, so they decide to raid the liquor cabinet. I told you he was a creep, the friend says, he’s old and nasty and beady-eyed. Tracy laughs at this, and then at her best friend’s imitation of Isaac’s stutter. Though Tracy still feels confused and ashamed after a pull of tequila, the feelings hurt less. What she feels most of all is that she can’t get life right no matter how hard she tries, and she wishes someone would just tell her what to do. She confesses this to her friend on the roof of the apartment complex. The friend confesses to feeling similarly and being scared she’ll never feel better. They are both very drunk. They hug, and Tracy looks at the skyline over her friend’s shoulder. She thinks, This is our town, and always will be.

Aldous Huxley wrote of humankind’s “basic drive to self-transcendence.” Great modern mystic that he was, Huxley understood well the painful fact of being a self among selves, the way the petty demands of the ego consign us to grey little lives sealed away from divine beauty. Alcohol is but one of the many drugs employed by human beings as avenues of escape from the insulated self, he wrote in The Devils of Loudun,and he might as well have added: The younger you are and more trapped you feel, the better an avenue it tends to look. Same for cannabis, cocaine, MDMA, Adderall, Klonopin, etc. But of course I already knew this, as did the many addict characters in the novel I was writing. And so, it turns out, did the addicts in the novel my mentor was writing—the one he would publish a short time before mine.

Lee, one of the younger characters in my novel, was a college stoner as I had been. His antic, self-interested father favoured amphetamines, as I did increasingly during my time in the program. Come early evening, I was too impatient to wait for my weed or whiskey to wear off so I could get back to writing. Producing more pages of my novel meant I could share them with my mentor, which meant I could receive his hearty approval, which meant more flattery for the hungry maw within me.

The semester progressed, and practically every week someone workshopped something that made my hair stand on end with its beauty. These stories have since been expanded into novels or appeared in collections that have garnered well-deserved and loyal readerships, major prizes, prestigious teaching positions. All conventionally sought markers of success, all things my mentor seemed obsessed with, and things I felt increasingly obsessed with as well. My vision narrowed to a pinpoint, and it became difficult to maintain community with my talented peers: time spent socialising was time that could be better spent producing more pages, and thus validating my presence in the world. I’d go to workshop, then toss back a few drinks at the fiction writers’ favoured bar, then go home and smoke a bowl, snort a line or two, write as many words as I could, try not to compare myself to others, fail.

Drink, smoke, snort, write. I’m sure I would have had a routine just like this outside the program, but I wouldn’t have had my mentor to get coffee with. When a well-known literary magazine published an excerpt of my novel-in-progress, he bragged about it to his workshop students. That’s my thesis student, he told them. He proposed we thread the universes of our novels together with character cameos. I was flabbergasted, and honoured. Together we planned out when a janitor from my novel would appear in his, and when a professor from his novel would appear in mine.

Carefully, reverently, I sketched the professor into a chapter that takes place on an East Coast campus. I felt like a portrait artist copying an old master, striving to replicate his creation without botching it. I told my mentor that it was okay if my janitor ended up in his editorial wastebasket. “Nonsense,” he said. “He’ll be in there.” And then he said something that I had no reason to believe he’d ever said before:

“I don’t give blurbs anymore, but I’m going to blurb your book. That’s how much I believe in it.”

Now the magic dust was truly swirling. My hands were shaking from it, or more likely it was because abusing amphetamines makes it hard to remember to eat. Drink, smoke, snort, write, repeat. It seemed like I’d passed out and woken up and it was already time to graduate.

At the end of our second year, we were judged and ranked one last time to determine who would receive extra funding after graduation. I was awarded a fellowship whose donors requested my presence at a banquet and a mention in the acknowledgements of my book. It was May, and I knew that something was very wrong with me. The week before, a friend and I had smoked synthetic marijuana. While it rendered her slightly agitated, it somehow stoked the furnace of my self-contempt so powerfully that I became a cyclone of rabid energy. I downed several shots of gin while pacing the room and informing my increasingly sleepy friend of the wisdom I’d absorbed during my time in the program. Making meaningful art was all well and good, but one did have to eat, and I still didn’t understand how to turn my thesis into something that would allow me to eat. Also I worried everyone else thought I was a crazy narcissist, and perhaps I was a crazy narcissist, but then a very famous writer had once said in a speech to graduates of the program that only two members of their class would really, truly make it, and the fact that it was not yet known who those two members were was reason enough for everyone to keep working and hoping until the lucky winners were revealed. So didn’t one have to push oneself to the very brink of sanity, weren’t overwork and relentless comparison the bread and butter of any creative practice?

The next day, I went to my therapist. She thought I should see a psychiatrist, who thought I should take lithium carbonate for my moods. Which I did, seeing this as a precondition for satisfying my ambition. But I wasn’t about to give up any other drugs for it.

I told my mentor about it over coffee the morning before the banquet. I hadn’t slept the night before, for no other reason than my body didn’t seem to want to anymore. I showed him how my hands shook. I called upon his scientific knowledge, shared with him my recent psychiatric diagnoses. In his experience, had he ever known anyone to recover from such things?

He furrowed his brow with fatherly seriousness. He told me that it was a good question, one he felt unqualified to answer, having only read case studies as opposed to written them.

“But there may very well be a link between creativity—creative brilliance, even—and these sorts of mood disorders,” he said, regarding me with interest.

After the banquet, I went back to my apartment and snorted two lines of ketamine.

V. Characters Behaving Badly

Many a CT scan and longitudinal study have confirmed what we all feel on a gut level to be true, which is that the body knows when the mind’s being messed with.

Graduation approached. My sleep came unevenly if at all, hair fell from my scalp in brittle clumps, and I lost weight at a rate that outpaced even the demands of my eating disorder. More importantly, things were already going wrong with my career. Of the many agents who’d visited the program, only one had shown partial interest in representing my novel. The director had even given my name to a particularly high-powered agent, but he passed on my manuscript and signed a few of my peers, selling their books for life-changing advances.

I became envious, and I did not wear it well.

Maybe it was true that writing was a zero-sum game, and I’d lost. But then why did my mentor seem to think I was destined for a magnificent career? Whenever I limped into his office, addled with drugs and anxiety, he told me not to worry. These things take time, he said. He let me in on a little secret about the novel he was working on: it was proving so incredibly hard to write. Even at this stage of his career, with all his validation and experience and an editor at a major publishing house ready to print whatever he wrote, my mentor still found the process of writing this book to be like fumbling through a dark room with oven mitts on. It was almost painful at times, perhaps because the professor was such a loathsome character, or perhaps because the deadlines just kept whizzing past my mentor. He confessed that he sometimes felt lonely among other writers, that he only had one real friend in town: a fellow baby boomer with a name like Tom, Dick or Harry—we’ll call him Dick. It was very important to my mentor that Dick was not a writer. My mentor found this fact incredibly grounding, relished just being able to go fishing with Dick and shoot the shit, man to man.

“Have you considered making friends with people who aren’t writers?” my mentor asked me.

I probably should have, because people who were writers were finding it increasingly difficult to be friends with me. I became obsessed with how my peers were “outpacing” me. I isolated myself from their brilliance, focused on finding a way to transform the thesis my mentor had such faith in into a book that he could someday hold. On graduation day, my mom snapped a picture of me standing between my mentor and the director. In it, I’m wearing another babydoll dress and squinting into the late-May sunlight. I’m thinking, Things will turn out okay. They have to.

It’s a tale as old as time, the subject of countless campus novels. The writer of erstwhile promise wrote a first novel that flopped commercially, so he’s now consigned to a life of academic obscurity. To temper his bitterness and envy, the writer sleeps with a student or steals his rival’s wife or gets involved in an elaborate plot to ruin the dean’s career. What he doesn’t do is test his friends’ patience by calling them at all hours of the day and night and begging them to explain in detail why he’s failed so spectacularly. He doesn’t rub OxyContin on his gums and do mind-annihilating bong hits while not moving from the sofa for six consecutive episodes of New Girl. He doesn’t send email after email to his mentor requesting that he also weigh in on what went wrong. He doesn’t buy a copy of the mentor’s new book and then not read it out of flaming embarrassment for having let someone down who loved him. He doesn’t think the mentor’s radio silence is due to a combination of embarrassment and ignorance about the phenomenon of failure, the latter being something the mentor has never experienced himself.

One day, I was texting with another peer whose patience with me was thinning. I just wish I had someone in my corner, I wrote, to which she responded flatly: You do. And then she told me something that shocked me: though she’d started the program years after I’d graduated, she could confirm that my mentor was still talking about me when she was in his workshop. He’d rave about you to us, she said. So yes, you’ve actually always had people in your corner.

She was right to call me on my frantic need, the greedy maw that had long ago swallowed my joy and turned me solipsistic. But she was wrong about my mentor being in my corner.

VI. Art Imitates Life

There is no restaurant like Elaine’s in the town where the program is located. So when I came back to give a reading, my mentor and I agreed to meet at his favourite Italian place instead.

It had been four years since I’d graduated and my debut novel had just been published. My reading had been well-attended, mostly by members of my cohort who were still in town. The first round of sales figures hadn’t returned yet. When I’d read to the nearly full room, it had felt like my book might actually succeed.

I strode triumphantly into the Italian place, thinking of all the things I wanted to say to my mentor, all the jokes I’d crack and observations I’d make. But when I arrived at his booth, I was surprised to find Dick sitting with him. Dick looked exactly as my mentor had described him: thin and bespectacled with flawless posture. His speech was efficient and declarative, like a military officer’s.

The conversation consisted mostly of Dick asking me questions and then paying me compliments. He said he’d absolutely loved my book, and was keenly interested in where I’d gotten the inspiration for it. He hoped I knew how impressive I was, and what a joy it had been for my mentor to work with me while he was struggling with that damned novel of his about the chauvinistic professor.

As if prompted, I turned to my mentor to tell him that I’d purchased my hardcover copy of his book and was so sorry I’d been too busy to read it yet.

“No rush, you’ll get to it when you get to it,” he said. “Or not! That thing was hell to write, maybe it’s not even worth the read.”

He laughed, and so did Dick, and before I could object my mentor asked if I’d sign his copy of my book. I’d looked forward to this moment for some time, had planned the heartfelt message of gratitude I’d write on the title page. But when he set the book in front of me, I was once again surprised. It was the paperback advanced reader’s copy I’d had the publisher send him almost a year ago. He hadn’t purchased a hardcover copy at my reading. He of all people knew how much book sales mattered to a writer’s career, hardcover sales especially. I felt gutted.

Stop it, I told myself. You’re being a child. He can’t buy every single student’s book. That’s an insane ask.

I signed the advanced reader’s copy for my mentor. And then I signed the hardcover Dick had bought at my reading.

Given the number of underage paramours Woody Allen had in the ’70s, it could be argued that there were several inspirations for Tracy. Still, Christina Engelhardt is unique among them for having actually met Allen in Elaine’s. In 1976, when she was a sixteen-year-old model, Engelhardt dropped a note on the celebrated auteur’s table: Since you’ve signed enough autographs, here’s mine! She wrote her phone number below her signature.

Allen called. Engelhardt was brought to his penthouse. He didn’t ask her age, and they began a sexual relationship more or less immediately. They met on over a hundred separate occasions in Allen’s Fifth Avenue apartment, where he dictated every term of their engagement. Sometimes Engelhardt would be quizzed on philosophy or challenged to a chess match. Sometimes there would be other teenaged girls, and Allen would initiate group sex. Engelhardt has written an unpublished memoir about the experience. In a 2018 interview with The Hollywood Reporter,she said she considered Allen a great man, and still does. She also said the experience stripped her of any agency, and that she would be an emphatic no to either of her college-aged daughters entering into a similar entanglement.

After four years of sleeping together, Allen told Engelhardt that he wanted her to meet his new girlfriend. That girlfriend turned out to be Mia Farrow, an actress fourteen years Engelhardt’s senior and already famous for her roles in Rosemary’s Baby and The Great Gatsby. Engelhardt was devastated. She didn’t understand what this made herto Allen. She didn’t understand why he’d wanted her and Farrow to meet. Still, she kept it together for the handful of threesomes Allen orchestrated with Farrow. Engelhardt at least enjoyed the fact that she and Farrow got to talk about astrology, a subject Allen was clueless about.

Engelhardt first saw Manhattan in theatres, when she and Allen were still involved. She knew nothing of the plot going in, and assumed the story would hinge on the romances between Allen and his adult co-stars Diane Keaton and Meryl Streep. She was shocked to find that Isaac’s arc with Tracy was the real backbone of the film. “We had shared such a special bond from the start, something magical, and now here was his interpretation of me and us on the big screen for all to see in black-and-white,” Engelhardt said. “How could he deconstruct my personality and our life together as if it were just some fictional creation for art house fatheads to pore over?”

Hurt, Engelhardt told Allen when she saw him next that she’d noticed an awful lot of similarities between herself and Tracy. His response invited no discussion:

“I thought you would.”

VII. Life Imitates Art

The good news is that the camera keeps rolling, even for the extras.

Restated as a Rule of Nonfiction: Life always goes on. This is true regardless of whether you’re the great man or the girl who cries when he dumps her in the diner, chickens out of his threesome, deems herself a “failed writer” in comparison with him.

Some years passed, and then some more. I got a teaching job, got married, got sober, published two more books that did better than my first, got tenure, left the teaching job to write full-time. Though I still felt fondly toward my mentor, I stopped trying to communicate with him.

If he came up in conversation with other writers, reactions would range from enthusiasm to impassive nods of recognition to mild disdain. The last often came from my mentor’s male peers: Yeah, he was pretty much a golden boy back in the day. People thought he could do no wrong. I chalked it up to more of the fame-jockeying and competition that seemed to have gripped my mentor long into the autumn of his career.

He’d been out of the public eye for almost a decade when conversations about him took on an unusual frankness. I’d barely thought about my mentor for some time when a friend said: “I have a story that’s going to disappoint you, Raf.”

The story this friend told was strange, if only because it was so similar to my own. It begins with my mentor leading a workshop at a writers’ conference. A novice writer submits a story for workshop. My mentor is gobsmacked by this writer’s talent. He hasn’t read a story this good in a long time. He can’t stop raving about it—he feels so lucky to have discovered a bold new voice.

“You know, I don’t write letters of recommendation anymore,” he says, “but I’ll write one for you.”

Years later, the no-longer-novice writer gets a phone call from a close friend. The friend says he ought to read my mentor’s newest novel. So the writer does, and he’s struck by a strange feeling of déjà vu.Of course these weren’t his ideas, but a version of what they might look like if set to wander the antipodes of someone else’s mind. It could have been an homage, but that would require an acknowledgement of influence, allusion to conversation. Instead, my mentor appeared to be in conversation with no one but himself.

A biologist might describe such a phenomenon as healthy variation. A difference in phenotype arising from a similar genotype.

A novelist might describe it as a character behaving badly.

Those who’d known my mentor when he was young confirmed the insouciant handsomeness I’d imagined, but told me that the easy confidence had been a front. Instead of writing stories of his own in college, he obsessively imitated famous writers he loved. He wanted to be great like these men, and they saw his devotion as a matter of course. Once, an entire fiction class held its breath as my mentor put up a story for workshop that was openly derivative of a story by the workshop instructor. Now this is a very good story, the instructor said with a smile. Perhaps he’d been flattered.

Before I rewatched Manhattan for the last time, I searched my office for my mentor’s book. It was gone, either lost in our recent move or donated beforehand. So I drove to the library and found it in the stacks and began reading it then and there.

His book is about a family of addicts who are also prodigies. There were Easter eggs that would have delighted me in 2014 but felt perverse to read in 2025. A character pursues a beautiful girl whose father teaches at the same semi-obscure liberal arts college I graduated from. Another character confesses to a mentor that his drug use is ravaging him; another muses about the connection between madness and brilliance. My janitor appears exactly as promised, witnessing an altercation between the loathsome professor and a spurned woman he’s sleeping with.

In my first book, Leland Sr is a grandiose and chaotic man whose obsession with getting high leads to the fracture of his family. His two sons inherit their father’s appetite for self-annihilation, and respond differently to it, the older through puritanical self-discipline and the younger through a drug habit of his own. I thought of these three characters as an unholy trinity, the three worst ways of dealing with what had begun to feel like a curse of my own, a growling Cerberus of cathexis, addiction, and madness. Like the professor in my mentor’s novel, I had a tendency to beat my head against the very wall I then accused of blocking me from greatness. Like the professor’s younger son, I had a tendency to roll on research chemicals when the prospect of actually getting what I wanted overwhelmed me. And like most any male protagonist’s love interest, I had a tendency to appeal to the wisdom of a great man when anxiety colonised my mind and the uncertainty felt unbearable.

Another Rule of Nonfiction: You can’t safeguard yourself from appearing in someone else’s art, nor would it be reasonable to forbid any use of your likeness, or to specify that your portrayal be flattering, non-fragmented, etc. In the course of living and growing and trusting, meeting with another’s gaze is inevitable. Becoming a subject is always a risk.

Back when my mentor was famous, a journalist told him in an interview that a wannabe writer had plagiarised one of his short stories and was sending it around to magazines under his own name. My mentor laughed. As crimes go, he said, this was a minor one. Had anyone died? Had anyone’s house burned down? The plagiarist wanted to get published, and imitating my mentor was a means to that end. Frankly, it was flattering.

VIII. Denouement

I only saw my mentor once more after our dinner at the Italian place.

The book tour for my second novel took me again to the town that housed the program. This reading was less well attended than my first, most of my friends having moved away long ago. Still, my wife sat in the front row and smiled proudly the entire time. And almost every one of the six or eight people in attendance ended up buying a book.

Though I’d sent him an email with the date and time, my mentor didn’t attend the reading. He arrived after I’d finished, wearing a black N95 and a knit sweater that revealed an expanded paunch. His hair had gone completely white and his hairline was noticeably receded. We exchanged a few words and posed for a picture before he left. I noticed a slight stoop in his walk as he descended the stairs. I was surprised and a little saddened by how rapidly he’d aged. It would be years still until my friend would warn me of the story about him that was bound to disappoint me.

As the rest of the attendees made their way downstairs, I recognised the tight-jawed man who remained seated in the second row as Dick. He looked more or less the same; time had been gentler to him.

“Shame about the turnout,” he said. “You were always such an incredible writer.”

I don’t think I’ll ever see my mentor again. I don’t think I’ll want to.

At the end of Manhattan, Isaac suddenly realises that it’s not an adult woman but Tracy whom he wants to be with. He races from his apartment to hers, catches her just as she’s departing to study acting overseas. He tells her he regrets the breakup and wants to take it all back. She says she wishes he’d said something sooner, because she’s about to be gone for six months. Six months? he shouts. I don’t want that thing I like about you to change. Tracy laughs: Come on, everyone gets corrupted. You’ve got to have a little faith.

Gershwin surges as Isaac smiles because a child has instructed him to have faith. He sees the Manhattan skyline, and she sees the door as she closes it behind him. She deadbolts it, then calls her landlord and asks him to change the locks.

That afternoon, she boards a transatlantic flight to London. Her parents greet her at Heathrow, tell her they’ve found an amazing apartment for her. And they have: it’s a one-bedroom in the heart of the West End, simple and elegant. She thanks them. She knows it will be perfect.

She throws herself into her acting studies. Just as Isaac predicted, she meets actors her own age, works with directors who recognise and nurture her talent, develops creative connections that will serve her later on in her career. That thing about her that Isaac likes, that she is a child wholly dependent on his affection for her sense of wellbeing, does indeed change. She becomes an adult who thinks about Isaac at first with disgust and anger, and then not at all. She writes and stars in a one-woman show about how it felt to be young and insecure and at the mercy of the dark hungry maw within her, how she spent years trying to feed it before realising she was better off feeding herself. The show is a smash hit and subsequently made into a film. When elderly Isaac watches it, he’s shocked and a little hurt by the nebbish they got to play him, a gangly no-name whose onscreen time adds up to roughly two minutes and who appears in the credits simply as GROOMER.

In the year I published my debut novel, Christina Engelhardt wondered aloud to The Hollywood Reporter what Manhattan might have been like had it told the teenaged girl’s story instead of the middle-aged man’s. “It’s a remake I’d like to see,” she said.

What a glorious and absurd thing this life is, Christina! What a joy, what a freedom, that the cameras never stop rolling! That the young girl gets to grow up and tell her story. That she may even be doing so right now.