I just wish I had written those books. Sometimes when I read them again and again, I even believe I have written them—like that weird thing that happens when you write a word like “suppose” or “nostril” or “petulant” over and over and over again until it becomes something unknowable, like you’ve made up a whole new word all by your lonesome. Well, it’s sort of like that.

The one I most wish I had written is Bird by Bird. If the truth be told, and I guess now it will be, I carry my beloved hardback copy of Bird by Bird around with my own photograph pasted on the back of it, as if I myself, my little person, this one, had written it. (And it’s an old photo, the kind that when you use it to announce your speech in a conference program, people act puzzled and disappointed when they finally meet you because, truthfully, you no longer look anything like that younger version of yourself, what with the prematurely gray hair and all…)

I read Bird by Bird several times a year, particularly in those moments when I think I should be writing, but am doubtful that I actually can, or when I’m in need of a reminder about what it means to write (not what it means to appear as a delightfully witty, thin, best-selling author on Oprah with good hair and eyebrows and a nifty bohemian chic outfit that you’ve designed and sewn yourself and that starts a fashion stampede, but, rather, what it means to actually sit down every morning and write, remembering Gene Fowler’s somber acknowledgment that “writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”)

In moments of sheer identification with what she’s saying, I guess I do believe I’ve written Bird by Bird, the connection between her words and my thoughts are so close. Like reading Book Three of War and Peace, that part where a soldier looks at the man who is about to execute him and says, “but you can’t do this because you have no idea what my life means to me.” “Yes! That’s exactly it!” you think to yourself. Or reading that essay about having a fear of heights where the writer finally surfaces what your own fear of heights is all about, but which you had never known or articulated for yourself, even through all those years of watching the fourth of July fireworks from the flat-roof-with-no-discernable-edge of your Capitol Hill house: “it’s not a fear of falling, but a fear of flinging yourself off.”