The Afterword: On Sartre on Writing

“The Afterword” is born from scribbles buried between cracked book spines, from the creased corner of a well-thumbed novel. Through this coming-of-age column, I hope to use the literary bildungsroman to make sense of my real-life experience of growing up — and to write the afterword on the texts I most treasure. My first memories of writing were not of my own. As I lolled about in the tepid waters of my bathtub, my mum would perch on a wooden stool, her open laptop balanced precariously in her lap. I’d relish her sentences in soap splashes, the bubbles of a buoyant turn of phrase dribbling down my bare back. Wading in the warmth of the water, in the warmth of her words, I’d watch her day’s work unfold before me, chapter by chapter, sentence by sentence. And when the finality of the last full stop was on the watery horizon, I’d savor an extra inch-full up to my chin, before the soapy slurry of an incomplete story drained coolly past my knees. For my mother, a published author of children’s fiction, the story was over—at least for the night. For me, it had only just begun. Later that night, I’d wait tip-toed at our home printer for a copy. It would stutter out, stalling at each textual disgorge, the smell of still warm paper and printer’s ink growing heavier in my hands. Crayons astray, I’d make amateur edits that only childhood’s playful naïveté could have gulled me to believe that my mother needed. I’d spend the next day at primary school coaxing the clock, waiting for my mother to climb the cliffhangers she’d abandoned me at the night before. To scale her story’s rising action, pen against paper, chisel against stone, and meet me armed with a new chapter by the time I got home from school. Only in the stuffiness of academic geek-speak did I get confirmation of what I’ve always innately known: that reading and writing, as Sartre puts it in What is Literature? , is a “pact of generosity between author and reader.” As a child, […]

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