The Green Eyed Writer

Robin Black, in Beyond the Margins, discusses writers envying other writers.

From the story...

My name is Robin and I am jealous of other writers daily, including – and this is an icky part – some of my very closest friends. It’s a tough admission to make, for many reasons. For one thing, I know that I have been incredibly fortunate to have my work published and to have some readers out there who like it; and to have had some good reviews, along with the inevitable (or so I tell myself) stinkers on Goodreads. It wasn’t all that many years ago that I was sobbing on my bedroom floor telling my (poor, long-suffering, inadequately compensated) husband that no one thought it was even worth the cost of the ink to print a story of mine. So it might seem unseemly to be jealous when you’ve had any success in this field in which it is so tough to succeed. And yet. And yet. We all are. At least, I’ve never met a writer who doesn’t envy other writers, and while it’s true I don’t know many of the richest & most famous writers in the world, I do know a few of them and have been amazed at how very little one’s achievements do to protect one from the sort of envy I want to write about here. The sort that is painful. The toxic sort.



I have been watching myself these past few months, monitoring my own reactions to the success of other writers and pondering why some of it bothers me and some it does not. For example (and let me tell you, what I am about to disclose here is pretty close to bathing-suit-at-the-age-of-50 exposing, something I am dreading about this summer, so I really hope it does some good. . .) when Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize, I felt no envy except of the mildest, gee wouldn’t it be nice to have had that career sort of musing. And when Mario Vargas Llosa won it I’m not sure that I felt even that. But when Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer, I had a bad few hours. And when a graduate school classmate was reviewed prominently, glowingly (and deservedly) in The New York Times, for her debut novel the week my own book came out, failing to elicit any reaction at all from The Times, I had a downright shitty weekend.