Like a lot of writers, I would often think, while dashing off a poem or wrangling with some plot twist in a novel, “If it pleases me, it will please others.” Isn’t that what they teach in adult education writing classes? It certainly was true for me back in the Ford Administration when I wrote incomprehensible poems in the style of John Ashbery or suspenseless novellas à la Gertrude Stein. My college friends sure backed me up—they were writers themselves, who felt and studied and wrote as I did.

But eventually I came to realize: If it pleases me, that might not be enough.

Yes, like Toni Morrison (this is the only time I will ever type “like Toni Morrison,” followed by the word “I”), I have always written with the aim of creating something I want to read, something I can’t find anywhere else.

But even Gertrude Stein had the wisdom to admit, “I write for myself and strangers.” Because, after all, it’s easy to please yourself—easy to fall in love with your own brilliance, whether it’s truly brilliant or truly trash.

Even now, as I and a lot of my writer friends hover around age seventy, I hear literary colleagues of my own demographic say, “I like it just the way it is,” after I’ve read their new play/poem/short story/blog post and offer some gentle editing suggestions. (Unasked for, I know, and this shortcoming of mine might be better addressed in another blog post.)

I’m also thinking of Mona Simpson, whose Anywhere But Here of 1986 was one of the best first novels I’d ever read, and whose second novel, The Lost Father (1991), was a dull disappointment. How did this happen? I imagine that the first book was such a critical and commercial splash that the suddenly powerful Mona signed a contract with Knopf that stipulated her second book not be edited.

This may or may not be true. But there’s a long list of follow-ups to smashing debuts that might give credence to my highly presumptuous hunch.

Forgive me if you’re a fan of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1975), but I think it’s an interminable and unconvincing follow-up to Carrie (1974). And after Charles R. Jackson published his masterly The Lost Weekend (1944) (which incidentally gives a gay backstory to the character Ray Milland played in the movie—but which backstory never made it to the screen), he gave us the crabby Fall of Valor (1946). And Tennessee Williams went from his unforgettable Glass Menagerie (1944) to You Touched Me! (1945), a “verbose letdown,” according to The New York Times in ’45.

Again, I may be wrong about all of this, but take Barbra Streisand. What masochistic Columbia Records music producer would’ve had the chutzpah to tell her in 1973 that she was wasting her time on cloying butter-cream frosting songs like “The Way We Were” when she should’ve been belting out more of the unpretentious powerhouse numbers of her early stardom? And what ever happened to her enchanting comic patter with the audience between the powerhousing?

Soon after I finally found a good Upper West Side therapist when I was in my twenties—a happy, no-nonsense mother of two with frizzy hair and glasses—I wanted her to get to know me better, so I gave her the dot-matrix manuscript of my never-to-be-published novel Tunnel of Love. (By the way, I only knew she had the two kids because I saw her getting ice cream for them by accident on Columbus Avenue one day. She was of the therapeutic school that did not share personal info.) I was pretty convinced that Tunnel of Love was a masterpiece. I had daydreams of a Pulitzer. Do you have to wear a tux when they present you with the medallion? What’s it cost to rent a tux?

After a couple of weeks, I asked the new therapist what she thought about the manuscript. It’s hard to know how I sounded when I asked her. Confident? Pleading? Halting? Haughty?

Her response was a whammy regardless. There had to’ve been something showing in my body language or inferred in my tone of voice. I bet it was the haughtiness.

“You just want me to praise you,” she said.

It’s so long ago now—forty years back—but those were her exact discombobulating words. And I remember what I thought, though I didn’t actually voice the responses:

“Fuck you.”

And “Youch.”

And “What she’s saying could help you.”

It was a turning point in my life as a writer and as a person. The therapist and I spent multiple sessions parsing my angry reaction and exploring why I’d written a novel full of impenetrable prose that put up a wall between myself and the reader. More Fortress of Solitude than Tunnel of Love. And it’s funny. She never once told me that my writing was hoity-toity. Somehow I discovered that on my own.

Maybe the conclusions we came to were obvious, but that didn’t make them any less difficult to face. I had thought that my writerly inscrutability made me the smartest boy in class. Which was hiding a fear of intimacy. Which was protecting a fragile ego. Which would have collapsed with the slightest unappreciative feedback. Or so I feared.

I’m thankful that I was able to sort that all out—thankful to the therapist and thankful to myself. That arduous emotional process prepared me for the real world of rejected submissions, fire-eating editors and long-term relationships. Yes, I’m still sensitive. Very. But I know I won’t break if I hear feedback that doesn’t praise me.

And the concept of perfection doesn’t even make sense to me anymore.