Gustavo Pérez Firmat

Friends of mine tell me that I'm striking a pose when I say that I'm not a writer but only a man who writes, but it's not a pose. I'm not comfortable being—or being called—a writer. It doesn't seem like what I was cut out for. It's vaguely embarrassing. I can't explain it to my father. In spite of my success, I have the abiding sense that I've ended up in a place where I wasn't meant to be. Two roads diverged in a wood, and the one I took was the garden path. These feelings of vocational misplacement—vocación as equivocación—haunt me, and they arise as much from my career as a professor as from my career as a writer—I mean, as a man who writes. Sometimes I'm angry at myself for not having made more conscious and conscientious decisions when I was young. You're twenty years old, in college, feeling worthless; you don't know what to do after you graduate, all you want to do is hide, and so you find a hiding place in an MA program in Spanish, not realizing that you've just signed over your life to literature. Then, thirty years later, still hiding, you sit in front of a computer making a living from literature by bitching about it. Even though my writerly signature is Firmat, I'm really un Pérez cualquiera, Spanish for an average yo.
-Gustavo Perez Firmat

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