And the related question, Why?

Not the easy, self-loathing, adolescent why? but the why? of the artist who knows only too well when she is telling the truth in her work and when she is lying, however beautifully or with what technical finesse. Why go there, why put myself through that? Wasn’t it painful enough the first few times around? The contempt one has, early on, for the “made” writers who phone it in while happily cashing the checks changes over time to a rueful sympathy: It’s very hard to keep doing this. And to do it for real, to write from the marrow? Only a college student would self-righteously insist on that sort of purity. Even Tina Turner still sings “Proud Mary.”