“I loved this book. All your books. I’m a huge, huge fan,” I told Mary Gaitskill when I met her yesterday in advance of our Lit Up interview. It was so horribly awkward to say this for some reason! It always feels oddly humiliating to confess to being someone’s fan. I’m not really sure why!  But I was glad I had said it when, toward the end of our conversation, we started talking about fame, how unpleasant it must be to be Rihanna-level famous and how many people aspire to being famous anyway.  Mary’s theory is that people confuse fame with love. That seems right. I don’t think it’s because people are stupid. It only starts to seem obvious that notoriety of any kind is a barrier between you and other people after you have experienced a taste of it. 

Toward the end of our conversation I said something I had been thinking about for a while: Sometimes, when people who claim to admire me meet me, they act mean to me. I understand why, I think. They need me to fail a test of some kind during our interaction. They’re looking for flaws because they admire some things about me but not others and they need confirmation one way or another about their undecided feelings. Or they want me to know that they aren’t some kind of sychophant FAN, that we are peers and they aren’t impressed by me.  I know that this is what’s going on because I’ve acted both of those shitty ways in my interactions with people I’ve admired over the years. 

But if you have loved someone’s work – even if you don’t love 100% of their work, all the time, or think you might not love all their work 100% of the time in the future, or you disagree with some of the things they’ve written, or they have allied themselves with some person or artwork or political view that you just can’t abide – even so, go ahead and say it. “I loved your work. I am a fan.” If the person doesn’t react well to this, that’s on them. But if you don’t say it and you expect them to just know it? Somehow? based on how you act, but then you act shitty? That is on you (me) and it’s time to cut it out.