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Having just joined a book club with a friend, I needed to buy Capote’s In Cold Blood. I had less than five minutes to run in, buy the book and get out before my mom would be forced to learn how to drive stick shift and move my car out of the fire lane outside of the bookstore. Needless to say, I wouldn’t have time to meander through the aisles, as I normally would have done, taking my time to find not only what I had set out searching for but what might catch my eye as well.
What struck me after I asked for help was when the kind woman directed me to the bestseller shelves and said, “It’s a top seller, now, after all these years.” This hit me because, for writers everywhere it might seem like we will never get published at all, let alone hit any sort of bestseller list. It’s curious how time can change the way the public looks at works of art. I’m sure we’ve all mused, at some point in our lives, about the genius of Van Gogh or countless other artists who were virtually unrecognized in their time. Not saying that many, many people haven’t read Capote in the past; but now, with a new movie out and Phillip Seymour Hoffman winning an Oscar for his performance in it, Capote is assured a far wider audience.
My point, or so I thought when I began, was that sometimes it will take years to truly be recognized. However, now I’m not sure if that is comforting or only more frustrating.