Helen DeWitt is the psycho we need

Only mentally ill geniuses get to be unavailable

Helen DeWitt is the author of critically acclaimed titles like The Last Samurai and Lightning Rods. (Photo by Aileen Son)

Last Wednesday, acclaimed novelist Helen DeWitt went public with the dramatic tale of how she lost $175,000 because she couldn’t find Wi-Fi in Amsterdam.

Perhaps you think I’m exaggerating (only slightly) or perhaps you think I’m being unkind (I am, but DeWitt is our hero in the end, so stick with me).

DeWitt, best known for her debut novel The Last Samurai, had been selected to receive the Windham-Campbell Prize. The self-described purpose of the prize is to “call attention to literary achievement and provide writers with the opportunity to focus on their work independent of financial concerns.”

As part of this award, according to DeWitt, the winners are expected to attend a six-day festival at Yale,¹ appear on a podcast, and make an audio and video recording. The recording required setting aside roughly one day where the organizers would bring production equipment to the awardee’s house and produce a bunch of content.

Given that I had never heard of the Windham-Campbell Prize (if you had before this saga, sound off in the comments), it’s reasonable that they were hoping to raise the cachet of the award through publicity by various recipients. After all, if the prize confers prestige, and not just enough money to land you in the 92nd percentile by income, that could help future awardees get attention, book deals, etc.²

Having read the entirety of her account of giving up the Windham-Campbell prize as well as many, many tweets, it’s clear that her reaction to the irritations of bureaucracy goes far beyond the normal frustrations many people experience with logistics.

After reading the publicity requirements for receiving the Windham-Campbell Prize, DeWitt wrote: “I think I am looking death in the face.”

I do not think she is joking.

DeWitt couldn’t figure out how to get Wi-Fi while in a walkable capital city of a European country, she didn’t realize she was running out of cellphone data playing mahjong on her phone, couldn’t figure out how to get more cellphone data, and struggled to write emails on her phone.

Her objections vacillated between logistical frustrations heightened by her mental difficulties and the very indignity of being asked to do PR: “impossible to imagine Pynchon or Cormac McCarthy, in early career, contemplating this with anything but horror.” Other artists who she believes would find this “unthinkable” include Dickinson, Proust, Kafka, Beckett, Salinger, Ferrante…

This all, at first glance, seems absurd.

As many people pointed out, complaining about getting paid $175,000 for what would amount, generously, to two weeks of work is comical. To her detractors, DeWitt offered the following mitigating factors: She had spent 15 months looking after her severely ill mother and was already drained from dealing with various other bureaucratic hurdles, including immigration problems. When a fan praised her integrity, DeWitt pushed back, claiming mere incapacity.

And there’s a real, documented history of severe mental illness.

In 2004, DeWitt went missing after leaving a suicidal email message to a friend, something that had reportedly happened at least one other time. And littered throughout her blog post detailing the Windham-Campbell saga is evidence of severe dysfunction: A withdrawal from a writer-in-residence position at the University of Virginia, repeated references to “voices” that plague her, and textbook rumination: “if something is completely irrational the mind keeps going around and around and around for hours – it keeps me up till 5 am, I sleep, as soon as I wake it is going around and around and around again, and it goes on for days, weeks, months – this was the whole reason to come to Amsterdam! To be cut off. To shut down the arguments in the crazy head.”

It’s important to note that the organizers are incredibly accommodating. In an unprecedented move, they offered her the choice to accept the prize the following year so she could put off the logistics until after she was more settled. They also offered to kill the podcast and significantly curtail the video promotional requirements.

The reactions to this episode have largely fallen into two camps:

1. DeWitt is a genius, you should just give her the money you idiots.

2. DeWitt is a diva and if she can’t pull herself together to do a modicum of work, that’s on her.

But another lesson of the DeWitt Drama is that only a mentally ill genius is allowed to opt out of the escalating demands on our attention.

You cannot write a good book with divided attention

The DeWitt Drama has a happy ending. Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures (of which I am also a recipient) offered the author an unrestricted grant of $175,000 with no expectations whatsoever.

What if DeWitt weren’t mentally ill? What if she simply didn’t want to look at her emails, film content, or show up at a conference?

I think if it came out that a well-adjusted creative had turned down $175,000 because it was too annoying to do some promotional work, the internet would have eaten her alive.

Interruption is taxing, and yet life is just one interruption after another. Some interruptions are terrible misfortunes like a severely sick child, and others are mundane like your coworker messing something up and pulling you into their problem.

Simone Weil once argued that attention requires “negative effort.” That is, a state where “our thought must be empty, waiting, not seeking anything.”

Some of the most impressive people I know are those who are able to mute the voice that interrupts to remind you of the dinner you have planned, the email you were supposed to respond to, the friend waiting for you to return your call. People who you have to almost shake to get them to lose focus on what they want to do. Most people consider these unwitting iconoclasts to be, at best, very rude.

The level of prioritization it takes to truly produce something great puts you directly in conflict with people in your life. Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, relied on her sister to handle her legal decisions, correspondence, business, and privacy. Cormac McCarthy’s second wife had to support them through poverty as he refused speaking gigs that could have provided a financial cushion. Leo Tolstoy’s wife, Sophia, managed their estate and copied the manuscript of War and Peace by hand seven times from beginning to end, negotiated with censors, and handled his copyrights. Of this, she wrote: “I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture, I am a woman.”

Many such cases.

I think, at some level, the ability to singularly focus on your work is a force multiplier. Most people probably don’t want to be close friends with or married to someone who is unwilling to bear a reasonable amount of life’s tedium.

Refusing to play the game is restricted to those who can bear the costs. If DeWitt had never written The Last Samurai,³ if her genius were still speculative, or worse, nonexistent, her refusal to join the rest of us in ambient availability would not be lauded by anyone.

The attention crisis isn’t just a problem for mad creative geniuses

This isn’t just about work, most people aren’t novelists or writers at all for that matter. But there are activities in your life — attending religious services, spending time with your children or loved ones, reading a book, watching a play, playing a musical instrument — that deserve your full attention. Are you giving it to them?

Whatever it is that you would like your attention to be on, interruptions are not just costing you the time it takes to resolve them, they hover in the background taking up valuable memory space.

There’s no single place where I could find out what the expectation for responding to a text or email is. But there’s suggestive evidence that not responding to a text after 20 minutes might be rude and most people expect a response to an email within one day. I was once told that taking more than 15 minutes to respond to a Slack message during the workday was unacceptable.

A survey of parents found that the average parent receives roughly four school- or extracurricular-related emails every day, and the majority admit to missing an important one. A mommy blog chronicled the “push notification hell“ of sending her kids back to school in the fall:

“PowerSchools, Class Dojo, SeeSaw, TeamSnap, some app that manages our lunch accounts (or claims to, but actually sucks) — how many apps can one community use? A lot, apparently, and from talking to friends I know this is the case across the country. While our Boomer parents love to tell us to ‘just put our phones down and be present,’ every facet of modern parenting is driven by push alerts and group chats. We can’t, mom.”

Burdensome demands on our time come from our friends, family, community, and, of course, our government. The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey has written about the Time Tax levied on those who have to navigate the social welfare programs.

Even Cowen, who has built a reputation for providing unrestricted grants with minimal reporting requirements, has high expectations for connectedness. Cowen’s 2022 book Talent⁴ repeatedly quoted Sam Altman arguing for the virtues of responding to your email quickly: “I have almost never made money investing in founders who do not respond quickly to important emails.”

After this book came out, I had a number of people joke to me that they had heightened their attention to their email response time.⁵

I think this equilibrium is bad. I think it’s bad that not only can we reach anyone at any time but that we expect to reach them. That what are purportedly requests for contact are actually demands.

The cost of your attention is rudeness

One time after giving a speech, I was approached by someone who wanted me to give a speech to their organization. I thanked them and told them to email me, at which point I was told they already had emailed me but, “don’t worry, I know you have a reputation for not responding to your emails.”

If it’s true that I have this reputation, then it’s fairly earned. I don’t respond to — or even see — many emails and texts that are sent to me. I got a dumbphone and a new number last summer and have missed countless texts and calls on my old phone, I’m sure. And every few years, I abandon an email address and just start a new one.

While I don’t think it’s pathological, my tolerance for interruption is just very low. Every time I’m interrupted from writing or reading, it costs me a lot. And it had gotten to the point where the only time I got any significant work done was the middle of the night when no one was reaching out and the expectation to respond had disappeared. Even now, most of my writing happens in the evening and on weekends.

I think a lot of people are unhappy with this equilibrium, and the resentment they feel at the DeWitts (or the Demsases of the world for that matter) getting to be rude and continue succeeding is fair. Not everyone runs their own company or can access capital to do their work despite their lack of availability.

But change starts from the top.

My hope is that one day it won’t just be mentally ill geniuses like DeWitt that can say no to a prep call and remain in good standing. But for that to happen, more people need to begin paying the social costs of unavailability.

People tend to get very annoyed when you respond to coordination problems with “be brave and simply bear the costs” but … be brave and simply bear the costs. This isn’t to deny that there are structural problems, it’s just to point out that while you are waiting for the structural problems of the smartphone age to resolve themselves in Silicon Valley or on Capitol Hill, your life is flying by.

These costs will not be fairly distributed. Very successful and very rich people will not be as vulnerable to the harms of being perceived as rude. But consider, the harms of remaining permanently connected are not borne equally either. Rich people can hire assistants, nannies, and cleaners to off-load logistics, while the rest of the income ladder can’t.⁶

What I’ve found in my nine-month experiment with increasing disconnectedness is this: If someone really needs to reach you, they will get to you. Sometimes you’ll miss things, but that’s okay. The cost of being available is far higher.

You should be clear-eyed about this. Some people will assume you don’t like them. Others will assume you’re stuck up or full of yourself. But at some point, you have to decide what your attention is worth and who gets to direct it.

For 300,000 years, humans walked the earth; for the last 20, we’ve had smartphones. It’s possible to reframe what politeness means, who is owed our availability, and discover the right to say no without social approbation.

I don’t want to lay too much at the foot of the smartphone — after all, modernity has brought those of us in rich countries more leisure time than at nearly any point in human history⁷ — because the vision I’m gesturing toward is genuinely radical. At no point have the majority of people had the time, space, and inclination to direct their own attention at their discretion.

Most importantly, that was because of material deprivation that constantly demanded our attention to find food, shelter, and safety. But it was also because of various toxic systems like racism, which, to borrow from Toni Morrison, distract us from our purpose:

“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”

Coercion, whether in the form of bigotry or lack of individual rights, has long prevented us from commanding our own minds. But now, as we have come so far in addressing racism, sexism, and material deprivation, we find ourselves in another bind of our own making. I think perhaps this is part of the human condition; there will always be something seeking to pull you away from yourself.

Recommended reading:

1. The festival page says four days.

2. On the other hand, as a person who gets asked to do a lot of panels and speeches, it is incredibly annoying how quickly the request turns from: “Can you show up for one hour six weeks from now” to “Also can you schedule a 45-minute prep call next week, can you share what you think your first question will be, can you review your bio for our promotional materials” and on and on and on. And yet, I think this comparison serves to minimize, rather than illuminate, DeWitt's experience.

3. I didn’t want to take everyone’s word for it, so yesterday I picked up The Last Samurai. And while I’ve only read 70 pages by the time of this writing, the first chapter was one of the best I’ve ever read in my whole life.

4. Co-written by Daniel Gross.

5. I expect Cowen thinks that fast replies to your email for novelists is actually negatively correlated with talent even if it is positively correlated for *gulp* journalists and entrepreneurs.

6. Maybe AI will fix this: First by destroying email and text through spam bots and second by giving us tools to sort through all that for the actually important emails and texts we are receiving.

7. At least any part of human history that you would actually want to live in. Apparently, there's some dispute about hunter-gatherers: lots of time to meditate when you can't store your excess gathered or hunted foodstuffs.