Description
Book SynopsisA vivid, intimate, and inspiring exploration of how to write through persona, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning founder of an influential writing school.
Trade Review"In this tour de force on the artist’s life, Philip Schultz takes us deeply and intimately into the many perils of the writer’s perpetually hovering shadow of self-doubt, of fear and anger and shame and the astonishing truths that can be discovered if only the artist can find a way through—perhaps simply in the voice of another. Erudite, emotionally naked, and profoundly moving,
Comforts of the Abyss is an essential and unforgettable work." -- Andre Dubus III, author of Gone So Long and Townie
"A prolonged elegy for the poet Ralph Dickey is woven into sidelong autobiography where Philip Schultz ponders his father’s bankruptcies and early death, a story threaded through often hilarious accounts of Schultz’s friendships with writers: Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, Yehuda Amichai, Denise Levertov, Joan Didion, John Cheever. How to turn pain and humiliation into art? How to
be a writer? The answer, Schultz teaches, lies in imaginative transformation, as he demonstrates in this brave, raw, and inspiring book." -- Rosanna Warren, author of Max Jacob
"Philip Schultz turned a childhood obsession with masks and personas into a distinctive mode of writing, a compelling method of teaching, and finally an entire school of creative writing. Reading this marvelous and forthright memoir of his journey, a literary struggle, a passageway that has always been powered and impeded by doubt, I kept thinking of a line by Ralph Waldo Emerson: ‘I am
Defeated all the time; yet to Victory I am born.'" -- Edward Hirsch, author of Stranger by Night
