Read I Think You're Totally Wrong for Free Online

died when my dad was five. His mother was named Powalski and changed it to Powell. As a single woman in the 1940s, she had to fight her in-laws for custody and compromised by keeping my dad in Jewish school. Then she remarried aCatholic when my dad was nine. I’m just a quarter Jewish. Supposedly I can become an Israeli citizen based on this.
    DAVID: Do you think of yourself as Jewish in any way?
    CALEB: Not religiously. Ethnically, a little.
    DAVID: Culturally, does it resonate?
    CALEB: I’m fascinated by it. Whenever I bring it up, Terry will say, “Oh, you just want to be Jewish.” Yeah, like I want to be black, too.
    DAVID: “Caleb”: it’s such a religiously loaded name.
    CALEB: Moses sent twelve spies to Jerusalem and only Joshua and Caleb did God’s work. Joshua got an entire book. Caleb got a few lines. My father went to Jewish school, then Catholic school, and came out neither. I suppose he considers himself Christian. He says, “I know it’s silly, but I believe in God.” We rarely talk about it.

    CALEB: You ever believe in God?
    DAVID: Zero. How about you?
    CALEB: Yeah.
    DAVID : Really? Surely not now.
    CALEB: You read my novel twenty years ago. I don’t expect you to remember. It’s partly about a Christian youth who loses faith.
    DAVID: I didn’t know how autobiographical it was. What was the title again?
    CALEB:
This Seething Ocean, That Damned Eagle.
    DAVID: I’m obsessed with titles, and no offense, Caleb, but that has got to be among the worst titles I’ve ever heard.
    CALEB: That’s what you said twenty years ago, too.

    CALEB: I never became serious about life until I was twenty-six or -seven. Until then I focused on art, writing, and music. Then I switched and focused on life. And the best artists focus on both.
    DAVID: Writing a book is as much an experience as falling in love.
    CALEB: If you’re a writer, you can’t focus only on life as depicted through art. Externally, you have to live, then internally create your art.
    DAVID: It doesn’t work like that. It’s the Yeats line: perfection of the life or perfection of the work, but not both. You’ve got to choose. It’s the only way to get anything done. Most people live through life. Not that many people live through art.
    CALEB: You’ve worked hard. You’ve written a lot of books.
    DAVID: People always praise me for “working hard,” but it’s the only thing I can do. You’ve immersed yourself in life much more fully than I have. You probably wish you’d written books that had been published. Whereas my portico gates slammed down a long time ago. It’s obviously a concern of mine: by focusing so much on art, have I closed myself off so completely from—
    CALEB: Yeah: the stutter, masturbation, acne, basketball heroics, the girlfriend whose diaries you read, the journalist parents who always did the “right” thing. I can’t objectively evaluate your writing because I know you, but at times it’s like you’re writing one long book.
    DAVID: It’s true of everyone. Everyone has only one—
    CALEB: Could you go a month without writing, but live extreme?
    DAVID: I’m sure I have.
    CALEB: Stupid question.
    DAVID: No, it’s an interesting question. I’m always working on a book. It’s pathological. The moment I’m finishing one book, I absolutely have to, as if I were an addict, create a windstorm around a new project.

    CALEB: Ken Kesey stopped writing because he said he wanted to live a novel rather than write a novel.
    DAVID: Such bullshit.
    CALEB: It’s partly a copout, but he has a point. I wanted to be a writer in college. I wrote one novel, kept rewriting it in your class, and then I said I wanted to live a novel before writing one. It’s not like I completely stopped, but writing took a backseat. I’ve written four books, along with stories and essays that could make