they asked me writing was a kind of revenge and I said yes, not a form of revenge against someone or something in particular, but a form of revenge against the fact that we live in an incomprehensible world, a cruel world, a world full of places where few people find their place. I started writing for the reasons I started reading for revenge. The world did not exist for me when I was in a book, because I had not existed for the world before. Everyday life is so cruel that someone had to replace it.. Reading and writing was one way of doing this.
I was thinking about all this on my way home after being asked if writing at a public event was a form of revenge. I was on the subway, contemplating my answer, wondering if I was speaking clearly enough. Near me, I saw a very fat woman secretly eating chicken legs. By covert I mean as covertly as possible to perform this action in a subway car. He would take a piece of meat from a greasy newspaper, put it in his mouth, bite it, and hide it again. I didn’t get the impression that the woman ate this way out of revenge, not from hunger. This is how he avenged his sad existence. Lady Di avenged her humiliating marital situation by emptying her refrigerator and throwing up in the royal lavatory.
I thought of anorexia as a form of revenge, alcoholism as a form of revenge, vigorexia as a form of revenge, DIY as a form of revenge… I suddenly realized that 90% of the population needs revenge. the life given to them. I went out on the street, where a kid was about to run over me on his motorcycle. He was driving blind as a kind of revenge. I thought that the world was dominated by revenge, and that the way I practiced it—reading and writing—was one of the most civilized, perhaps most cowardly, ways of doing it.
That night I woke up hungry and ate three yogurts in a row, standing in front of the open refrigerator, dimly lit by its bulb. I threw them up for revenge at dawn.