You know what bothers me about Michael Cunningham? He’s too good-looking to be a writer. (He wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours, also that movie with Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman.) He looks like he should be an actor, some outgoing bloke who only took up writing on a whim and happened to be fantastically, irritatingly good at it. It makes me suspicious, begrudging of his talent. Writers should be solitary souls, the kind of people who spent time alone reading as kids when everyone else was having snowball fights and building forts and therefore never acquired the overdeveloped social skills of good-looking people, people who look like Michael Cunningham. Writers should be loners—they have to be. People who are dead center in the happening of things can’t be writing about them. They’re too energetic, they lack the taste for solitude and morose tendencies that are the sustenance of good writers. My only hope is that he was a late-bloomer, the kind that only came into his distinguished good looks after passing through a shy, awkward adolescence; otherwise I shall have no respect for him at all. Just looking at his genial, handsome Irish face disquiets me. Good-looking writers can only be shams, more suited to adorn a book jacket than to write one. It just doesn’t seem fair that someone should be brilliantly social and brilliantly bookish. And you notice that every article about him is accompanied by that same picture, in which he looks irresistibly wise and witty, the kind of guy who would tell the funniest jokes at the party, delivered with mischievous, hearty complicity. Well, my only hope is that he’s an incurable dork in person.