Kevin Marman (2013) in the day.

Let’s start with the important stuff. In the Acknowledgment’s page Kevin acknowledges all his friends on a writers’ website AbcTales.com. Yeh, I know, never heard of it either. If I had heard of it I might have read some of Kevin’s stuff and in particular the narrator Tom meeting his sister, Karen, her husband Rod (Rod’s a rod) and their daughter Natalie to celebrate his mum’s eightieth-odd birthday, and been wildly impressed. Tom is a writer. I don’t like my narrators to be writers. I groan in the way I did when watching, on a Friday night, Why Don’t You— turn off your television and go and do something more interesting instead?  Tom also has an IQ of 157. I always thought the maximum break was 147, so I was shocked by this. He should know better than anyone else that writers don’t have friends, but acquaintances, and being a writer is boring. But every rock and every writer has a story to tell and this one resonated within me. I was trying to write a story about drink and my brother who’s dead and my Da, who had many of the same problems, was a nutter, and my sainted mother who held it all together for so long. I read this and I say snap, snap, snap. Fictional or factional, who really gives a fuck?  Writing is never completed until it is read. The reader completes the circuit. The best books, like Styron’s autobiographical Darkness Visible, make you think they’ve been written for you.  This has the feel of something written for me and something I already know.  I don’t need a drink. I don’t cut myself with a knife to feel that I’m real. I don’t need therapy. I’m not alienated and alone, but I am thinking about it. I’m in the day.  

http://www.longmarshpress.co.uk/intheday.html