Douglas Coupland: Regeneration X

While I was writing the book, I thought there would be, at most, a few people who I attended school with in Vancouver who might kind of get what I was writing about – or maybe a few people down in Seattle, which was a little bit like Vancouver back then. I was surprised, and remain surprised to this day, that so many people clicked with X – or with any of the books I’ve written – because it always seems, in the end, that writing is such a desolate, lonely profession and it never gets less lonely. In fact, as I sit here a few days before turning 50, it feels so lonely that I wonder if I can visit the place of writing any more – which, in a backward way, tells me that’s exactly why I should go forward. The things worth writing about, and the things worth reading about, are the things that feel almost beyond description at the start and are, because of that, frightening.

Douglas Coupland writes on turning 50, on the loneliness of the long-distance writer, and the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Generation X.