Quote of the Day III

He 'd told his parents he'd quit teaching in order to pursue a career in writing, and when, more recently, his mother had pressed him for details, he'd mention the Warren Street Journal (a Monthly of the Transgressive Arts), the name of which his mother had misheard and instantly begun to trumpet to her friends Esther Root and Bea Meisner and Mary Beth Schumpert, and though Chip in his monthly phone calls had had many opportunities to disabuse her he'd instead actively fostered the misunderstanding; and here things became rather complex, not only because the Wall Street Journal was available in St. Jude and his mother had never mentioned looking for his work and failing to find it (meaning that some part of her knew perfectly well that he didn't write for the paper) but also because the author of articles like 'Creative Adultery' and 'Let Us Now Praise Scuzzy Motels' was conspiring to preserve, in his mother, precisely the kind of illusion that the Warren Street Journal was dedicated to exploding.

Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections