JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Mat is reading Burning the Days, the memoir by James Salter from which this excerpt was taken.

The war I had survived was the Korean War. I had returned from it two years before, rich with memories of flying as a fighter pilot. I had kept a journal. I had written before: stories and poems as a schoolboy, and later, in the Air Force, a novel, which was sent to a publisher and turned down. The fateful letter, however, offered encouragement. If I wrote another book, the publishers would like to see it. And so, on an iron cot in a Georgia barracks one afternoon, seemingly without effort, I wrote the outline of a novel, and on weekends and at night over the next two or three years completed the book. It was called “The Hunters” and was immediately accepted. That was 1957.

The hour had come. I resigned from the Air Force, probably the single most difficult act I had ever performed, with the idea of becoming a writer. I had been in the military for twelve years. I had a wife and two small children. Thinking every day of the life I had left, unable to believe in myself apart from it, I sat down in despair and tried to write. A few years later, a second novel was published. It was more ambitious but also more derivative, and it disappeared without a trace. But I was, despite that, a writer, and could be introduced, at least for a while, as such. The problem was that I had no way to support myself. Then, almost as if on cue, a door opened to another world.

Read Passionate Falsehoods at The New Yorker.