Creating in the face of love and/or loss

I return often to a piece by Nick Cave, a brief response he wrote about creativity, and how it demands brutal honesty, especially when the subject is love. What draws me back isn’t the solacious celeb gossip of it—it’s the sharp insistence that writing about love requires a clear-eyed refusal to romanticize. This is not easy comfort. Instead, it’s an unflinching commitment to seeing love with all its tensions and failures laid bare. Writing, especially memoir, can’t afford the luxury of...