William pulled into the driveway and got out without turning off the car. An orchestra of birds tuned up in the branches overhead. He unlocked the front door and pushed into the house with his shoulder. He heard claws scrabbling on the tile; the dog bounded out of the hall and hit William hip-height. “Good boy,” he said, bending down to scratch the dog’s head. This one was black, with a white streak running down the forehead to the nose, and he slept in a crate in the garage. William went into the bedroom, where he lowered himself onto the bed and looked out to the driveway. Louisa was sitting in the SUV with the door open, illuminated by the interior light, still as a statue.
He closed his eyes and time passed, not very much, maybe, but enough that he began to feel its weight upon him. When he opened his eyes Louisa was out of the car, facing him, just a few feet from the house. She was backlit by the headlights of the car, which meant that she was looking at her own reflection and he was lost behind the glare. He wondered if she could see him at all. She made a spider of her hand and pressed it to the outside of the windowpane. William stood and went to the window. He waved with his sore hand, receiving no acknowledgment in return, and then lowered the hand to hip height, made a spider of his own, paired it with hers, across the glass, and stood there squinting at her silhouette as the light ran away from her in streaks.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Movies have credits, as do record albums. The contributions of others are recognized explicitly. Books, being strange, operate under the fiction that they’re produced by a single individual. As that individual, it falls to me to recognize the rest of the people who helped this book into being, in ways both large and small, subtle and straightforward, abstract and concrete, willing and somewhat less than willing. I’d like to thank my wife, Gail; my kids, Daniel and Jake; my parents, Richard and Bernadine; my brothers, Aaron and Josh; my friends Lauren and Rhett and Nicole and Charlotte and Nicki and Todd and Harold and Steve; my agents, Jim Rutman and Ira Silverberg; my boss at work, David Remnick; my colleagues at work; and, finally, last and most, my editor, Cal Morgan. I’d also like to thank all married men and women for living rewarding, frustrating, comforting, and disconcerting lives that are frequently in flux and too infrequently in focus.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…
About the author
A Conversation with Ben Greenman
About the book
Plotting a Point
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Author Recommendations
About the author
A Conversation with Ben Greenman
Where do you live?
In Brooklyn, right near where the spacecraft Barclays Center landed.
And yet, you chose to write about the suburbs. Why?
Well, I grew up in the suburbs, and I think I’m still there in some ways, in my mind. I got conditioned to believe certain things about human interaction, or the lack of it. In the suburbs, distance works differently. There’s more silence (which can be either paralyzing or erotic) and more meaninglessness (which can be either liberating or crushing).
But that’s about the book, and this is about the author. Let me ask you about the relationship between your life and your writing. How do you feel about writing autobiographically?
Generally, I’ve been against it. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve wanted to look more closely at the kind of life I have, even if that doesn’t exactly mean looking at my own life. As life goes on, it becomes more and more about weighing responsibilities against diminished (or narrowed) freedoms. I have accepted that in my marriage, in fatherhood, in work. But I haven’t explored the same principle in my writing. For a long time, I wrote with a maximum of freedom, meaning trickery and metafictional evasion. I told myself that taking fairly straightforward aim at the lives of my characters was less exciting, though maybe I was just avoiding it because it was less comfortable.
Do you worry about hurting people close to you when you write?
Yes. I know a writer (I won’t say who) who seems to take delight in calling out friends and lovers in his or her fiction. Is that bravery? Is that narcissism? I suppose I am not answering the question so much as asking more questions.
How else have you changed as a person, and how has it changed you as a writer?
When I published my first book, I was just recently married. I had no children. Now I’ve been married more than a decade and I have two children. Somewhere along the way, I crossed an invisible line that made those things more important than books. Or at least more important than what happens to a book once it’s published. At times, I would agonize over every little detail of a book’s publication and reception. Now, it seems like a somewhat arbitrary process that shouldn’t really be overthought, because it’s not purely predictable and not an enjoyable source of speculation.
How do you handle reviews?
At first, I read them all. Now, I try to avoid them all. I know lots of reviewers. I have worked as a reviewer. I respect the profession and think it’s vital to the future of literature that people continue to have conversations about books: what works, what doesn’t, why certain trends intensify while others wane. But I’m not sure it’s vital for the future of authors. More specifically: investing too much in reviews can be fatal for authors.
You have written a wide variety of kinds of books, from a collection of experimental short stories (Superbad) to a novel about a funk-rock star (Please Step Back). Do you have a mental list of other kinds of books you want to write but haven’t yet?
Sure. A political novel, a crime novel, a purely comic novel, a form of scripture, a novel in verse, a single-word novel, a memoir of a word, a travel book about imaginary places. 
About the book
Plotting a Point
WHEN I WAS YOUNG, I went to see an author read at a bookstore. He was older, though probably not as old as I am now. He was not exactly famous, but he had done good work for years. He was proud of what he had achieved, and rightly so. I sat on an uncomfortable chair with two dozen other youngish people and admired his reading for the clarity of vision, the lack of histrionics, and the evident pleasure he took in his sentences. He was not self-satisfied. He was not foolish. He did not talk about things like advances or sales. He was a good role model for a young writer.
Afterward, the audience asked questions. Two of them have remained with me. The second, I’ll talk about later. The first came from a young woman in the crowd who stood to ask it. She asked the writer why he wrote at all. The audience laughed, but it wasn’t a combative question. I think she just wanted to know why an intelligent person with other options would devote his life to the art of prose, which is often a prescription for obscurity. He thought about it. He scratched his not quite beard. “Well,” he said. “I guess to connect with people.”