On Giving a Reading When You Have Nothing Finished

The invitation arrived in August. A literary festival, a good one, a slot of thirty minutes on a Saturday afternoon in November. I accepted without thinking about the fact that I had nothing new to read, because writers almost always accept invitations without thinking about the fact that they have nothing new to read.

By October I had to decide what to do. The options were: read from the existing books and explain, or read something new and unfinished and not explain. I chose a third option, which was to read an essay I had written in a notebook three years ago and never shown to anyone, about the experience of waiting for a book to arrive. It was not fiction. It had no ending. I thought it might be interesting.

What surprised me — and I say this without false modesty, because I genuinely did not expect it — was how the audience responded. Not with polite attention, the kind that literary festival audiences are skilled at producing, but with something more personal. Afterwards, three people told me about their own waiting: things unfinished, projects suspended, years between one thing and the next. It seems that writing about incompletion is, paradoxically, one of the more complete things you can offer.

I did not tell them the essay had no ending. Or perhaps I did, and they did not mind, or they understood that the absence of an ending was the point. Either way, the thirty minutes passed as thirty minutes at a good reading should: too quickly, with the feeling that something was still to be said.