My dad called me and told me to read Jonathan Franzen's piece in the most recent New Yorker. He told me it was about novels and solitude and that he had been really struck by it. It's available online for a short time, so I made some tea and sat down by our rain-streaked common room window and decided to go for it.
After I was done, I sent off a not-quite-coherent/not-entirely-useless e-mail, which I am pasting here for posterity:

First! The selected quotes (with some annotations).

"a jumbo bottle of Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap" [!!!]

"But then I looked at some lichens & wrote a bit about them & calmed down and figured out that my sorrow was due not to a loss of purpose but to the fact that I didn’t know who I was or why I was and that I didn’t show my love to my parents. I was coming close with my third point, but my next thought was a little off. I figured that the reason for the above was that time (life) is too short. This is, of course, true, but my sorrow wasn’t caused by this. All of a sudden it hit me: I missed my family." {Hall of the Revels note: this part appears in Franzen's teenage journal, an account of 24 hours spent alone in the woods as part of a hiking camp}

"Apparently, in the past thirty-five years, I’d become so accustomed to narrativizing myself, to experiencing my life as a story, that I could now use journals only for problem-solving and self-investigation. [I can reeeeaaaally relate to this problem] Even at fifteen, in Idaho, I hadn’t written from within my despair but only after I was safely over it, and now, all the more so, the stories that mattered to me were the ones told—selected, clarified—in retrospect." [this is interesting because this is what creative writing teachers tell you to do: wait it out. Sometimes is might be better to have the raw material, though, to turn to later.]

"The most interesting aspect of the novel’s origin may be the evolution of English culture’s answers to the question of verisimilitude: should a strange story be accepted as true because it is strange, or should its strangeness be taken as proof that it is false?" [GAH. WHY was this published after my thesis?!?]

"We now understand a novel to be a mapping of a writer’s experience onto a waking dream, and a crucial turn toward this understanding can be seen in Defoe’s tentative assertion of a less than strictly historical kind of truth—the novelist’s “truth.”"

"...and {David Foster Wallace}’d been very explicit, in our many discussions of the purpose of novels, about his belief that fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude."

"A funny thing about Robinson Crusoe is that he never, in twenty-eight years on his Island of Despair, becomes bored."

"I spent two hours on various drying projects, followed by an hour of searching the promontory, to no avail, for a critical piece of tent hardware that I’d lost in my mad dash. And then, in a matter of minutes, the rain ended and the clouds blew off and I realized I’d been staying in the most dramatically beautiful spot I’d ever seen." [The parts that struck me the hardest--the parts that struck me as most emotionally honest--were the parts when he was confronting his own limitations and then takes a step back and realizes.]

And now some thoughts

I liked this. My favorite parts were the parts about David Foster Wallace whose novels, like those of Jonathan Franzen, I have actively avoided reading. From my incredibly limited and highly speculative experience, I think he does a really great (and really moving) job of describing friendship with someone with a mean mental illness; you don't have to like every part of them, and you can be critical and still love them.
Come to think of it, that could apply to almost every friendship.

In the end, I wasn't as in love with this article as I thought I would be while I was in the midst of reading the really good parts, and I think it comes down to the fact that Franzen is clearly an extrovert and an article on the same topic would be more relateable to me if an introvert had written it. I think his perspective is valuable, but I almost wanted an accompanying piece by someone like, I don't know, Colm Toíbín. Someone who is certainly no Emily Dickinson--someone who is a huge fan of other people and their stories--but someone who at the same time wouldn't have been driven around the bend at age fifteen or whatever by 24 hours spent alone. Or not. Maybe the fact that solitude freaks him out a bit is what makes Franzen particularly suited to write this.

It certainly made me want to write something. I've got that tight feeling in my face I get when I've just written something particularly from the heart. So thanks, Jonathan Franzen, you're not a complete jerk.

Love,
[Nom de Plume]