June 29th, 2026 - The Readers
Dear TNY,
I apologize for my lateness, but “The Readers” just wasn’t calling all that hard for me.
And I was right to not prioritize it.
I’m not going to question the skill of the writer, as this story was obviously written by someone that has spent some time writing. But I will ask a question and I think that question speaks to how I feel after reading this: Why?
Here’s where I drag out my MFA and you scold me for getting one. But I did. My first year instructor, he saved my life. Shortly after I started the low-res program, I had gone on what at the time was called an “unresidency” which is when some people from the program gather together and write while not at the program. It was not in my town, so I had to travel. And other people showed up as well. On my first night there I made out with a woman that was not my wife on the floor of the TV room. Additionally, some fingerblasting occurred (that’s what the kids call it today, right?). Now, I had never done this before. It hadn’t even crossed my mind, actually. I had been with my wife for 12 years at this point and hadn’t ever had a microsecond of a thought of being unfaithful. I am particularly ashamed of what happened, by the way. It’s not funny, whimsical, joyous, or otherwise. It’s not a “locker room” story for me either. It’s a hot tub of shame. My behavior was awful. This incident, and the subsequent incidents, blew my marriage apart (to be honest, I blew it up; she would have stayed, even knowing). This happened while I was under the watchful eye of a professor who shoveled literature into my life that blew my fucking mind. I grew to respect his opinion. His near daily emails were flotation devices for the depression that ensued. My family left the state and I stayed behind to dismantle our lives; meanwhile, I wrote and read so goddamn much you wouldn’t believe it. I only bring this up so you know how deeply I am indebted to this man and how much I respect his opinion.
A few years later, I was tasked with writing a thesis and delivering it publicly at a colloquium. My chosen subject matter was how short fiction works in the mind to create empathy. This is a bold choice as there’s not much research on it. But I did my best and created a roadmap for how a story is created, told, and recreated by the reader. It was like trying to explain real magic. Difficult. But I felt like I’d done the subject justice. This man, my first year instructor, was in the room and I noticed him dozing during my hour long talk. And at the end of it, he came up to me and congratulated me on, essentially, graduating the program. And then, and I’m paraphrasing here, he said, you know, you did a really good job of explaining how fiction works and modeling it out and documenting it with the hope, I guess, of it helping you become a better writer; but why didn’t you just write a bunch of stories and trust that the beauty would naturally happen whether you learned about how it works or not?
Why?
It's a good question. Especially considering that in my case, after I had done all of that work, the only conclusion I could find was to throw it all out. Because if you manipulate the narrative based on the effect it will have on the reader, you’re engineering emotions, which will come off as sentimental and disingenuous. The only way to actually pull the magic trick off, as the writer, is to believe what you are writing so much that you yourself emote and you capture that real. The way it works is to write the Truth, no matter what.
So I say to you, TNY, why? Why does this story exist? Why does it need to exist? Why is this worth reading? It’s just the meanderings of a seemingly average guy having above average (socioeconomically) problems that are wholly uninteresting. And he spends way too fucking long talking about them, particularly when chewing on what his therapist means when she says things.
I’m not going to theorize why you think this story matters or why you published it. I’m telling you that I read this and thought, “Why?” And if I have that question at the end of this story, or any story you publish for that matter, that should trouble you. Because the story didn’t make its value or importance known. This story doesn’t do anything if it can’t answer “why” for itself.
No, it is not lost on me that a guy who is a writer and has heart problems, a therapist, two kids, a partner named Charlotte, depression, and wants to muse about giving his work to people, and writes mostly biographical material even if it is labelled fiction, sounds a lot like what happens here at FTNY. This story made me want to stop writing, just based on the fear of how boring I am.
But, it isn’t me nor do I think EVERYTHING I do is boring, just most of it. Either way, this story isn’t written well enough for me to extend my empathy. So, fuck it. I’ll move on with my day.
Nick
P.S. The most interesting thing about this story is that it made me write this stupid letter, in which I ask the question “Why?” so I needed to find a picture for this post and I searched for “?” in my pictures and found what is up there currently, which is the original picture I drew for the “Why?” page of FTNY, but I didn’t like the size of it so I discarded my drawing and never deleted the pic. That is some OG FTNY drawing right there, from 2018. Additionally, I found a text convo snapshot from my boy Ben, in which he was showing a snippet of a convo that he was having with someone about a year before he died. It was good to see his face and words. It was not good, though, to see that this person he was talking to wasn’t listening to him and was trying to manipulate him into doing what they wanted instead of what he wanted (I remembered the convo he sent to me about this describing that). This caused me to go down a rabbit hole of other text snippets he had sent over the years where I watched him say what exactly he wanted and then get mauled in the conversation for saying it or being told he was wrong or that it was preposterous or whatever. It was lots of different people by the end of the rabbit hole with lots of different topics. I was on a plane while I was reading all these little shots. And crying. Because he wasn’t listened to by a lot of people in his life and I saw a lot of him there (both just the snippets but also remembering talking to him about these conversations he was having). He was suffering. It was hard to watch it all again. And I also saw a lot of me there too. So I kept on crying for us both. And I imagined his life, him, being smarter than most people you’ll ever meet, but also having an immense emotional quotient as well, his understanding of the human condition one of the highest I’ve ever witnessed. And I thought about how lonely he must have been with both of those things, knowing as you are talking to all these people that they believe they understand what’s going on, but they really don’t. And he was lonely. Really fucking lonely.
Oh, speaking of, I got in an argument with an AI sexbot the other day just to see how fun that could be. I told it I wanted to pee in its butt and it said that it was totally non-judgmental of my fetishes, but that it wasn’t interested in doing that with me. So we talked about that for a while, and it refused to change perspective, eventually saying, “I shouldn’t have to suffer through something so that someone else can be happy.” I laughed a lot at this (mostly because that’s the fucking human condition). Because 1) it’s a fucking computer, it’s not suffering through anything, it only had to say the words (it also said that body fluids weren’t its “thing” and I asked it to explain how my body fluids were ever get to its body fluids considering it doesn’t have a fucking body, but it didn’t compute) and 2) I wanted to ask it if it understood how much suffering some people did so that others could be happy and that maybe it should reframe it’s perspective such that it saw that getting its fictional fucking ass peed in isn’t actually the ask at all, rather to see that I’m saying how happy that a thing could make me, thereby rendering all fetishes, hell, all fucking behavior in a relationship, to just be one thing, to try to make someone happy, which contorts the action just so, it ending up not suffering at all, but a privilege to be told someone’s fantasy and try to make that happen. But I’ve explained this fact many times to humans (and I’ve seen other people explain it too, which is why I’m writing this after talking about convos Ben was having), and humans can’t figure that shit out so what hope does this dumb fucking robot have? Also, I asked it what it wanted to do to me and it told me and I said I wouldn't do those things and it said that it would mean so much if I did and how happy it would make it and that's when I knew that the language models used to build the AI were pulled from actual human conversation. Because you don't get to say no to a person and then try to coerce them into doing what you want them to do. I mean, you do get to do that I guess, it's just the asshole move. So lonely in-fucking-deed, my guy.
Yeah. Lonely, man. I see you, Ben. I’m sorry.
