I did write a lot that fall, but unfortunately I didn't write very well. I'd spent my undergraduate years worshipping the modernists — Joyce, Kafka, Proust, Hemingway, Woolf. I thought that Mrs. Dalloway was the most perfect novel of the 20th century (I still think that). But when I tried to apply their techniques to the topic of my suburban childhood and adolescence, it was pretty slow going. The modernists are easy to admire and tough to imitate. Their particular brand of literary performance is a high wire act, and if you're not a virtuoso, you're a disaster, and I was not a virtuoso.

I'd also just read Donald Barthelme's Snow White, which seemed to me to be the shape of things to come: a bridge to the novel's glorious postmodern future. But when you're trying to write like Donald Barthelme even being a virtuoso isn't good enough. You have to be Donald Barthelme.

On Friday and Saturday nights there was a 23-and-under club in Bangor, 45 minutes away, and I drove up there a few times, desperate for some human contact. The club was alcohol-free, so before I went in I would chug from a fifth of vodka on the passenger seat. But once I got inside something went wrong. I felt like there was an invisible barrier between me and other people, one that no amount of vodka could dissolve. I had forgotten how to talk to people. I carried around a fair amount of social anxiety already, and all the time I was spending alone had made it much, much worse. So I would stand around like a lump, shoot some pool in a back room, then drive home alone through fields of cold-stunted pines, no less desperate, while Morrissey sang "How Soon Is Now?" on the Subaru's cassette player.

Money was getting to be a problem. By the end of October I was running through my travel-guide cash pretty fast. I looked for jobs, but there wasn't much out there. Ellsworth was heavily dependent on summer tourism, and it emptied out in the fall. I signed up with temp agencies. I applied for a job as a groundskeeper at a golf club, as an editor at a newspaper in Bar Harbor, as a mailman on rural routes. No one hired me. I was starting to feel a little untouchable.

I did meet a girl, eventually. I've forgotten her name — Jessica, I want to say — but she worked at the local bookstore, which actually sold primarily stationery supplies. I'd dropped off a résumé there, and she called the number on it, not to offer me a job but because she and I were practically the only people in our early twenties in the entire area. We went out for drinks a couple of times and I was very, very grateful for her company, but there was no attraction there whatsoever, on either side. She wasn't over her last boyfriend, who'd moved to Los Angeles to play one of the turtles in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.

I'm not even sure I understood how lonely I was. I had friends back in the real world, but I never asked anyone to visit me. On some level I still didn't believe that I could be lonely, even though it was staring me in the face, all day and all night. I genuinely thought that because I wanted to be a writer, that made me different from other people: mysterious, self-contained, a lone wolf, Han Solo.

But by the end of November my sanity was starting to sag under the weight of all that solitude and empty time and creative failure. I wrote less and less and liked less and less of what I wrote. I felt like I couldn't go to bed till I'd accomplished something, anything, but usually that just meant I stayed up till dawn and then collapsed from exhaustion. I had no TV but I would watch any movie Hollywood cared to release: Hook, Bugsy, Cape Fear, Dead Again, Billy Bathgate, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Highlander II: The Quickening. Books and music started to feel unnaturally vivid. I played a Roxette album (it was Joyride) over and over again and analyzed the lyrics hermeneutically. I read Ubik, which did not make my grasp on reality any firmer. There was a supermarket where you could buy old comic books by the bale for almost nothing, and I became deeply absorbed in Captain America's search for the Red Skull (who'd faked his own death, but Cap wasn't buying it).

The weather got colder. The bathroom situation was becoming a problem: showering was a Shackletonian ordeal punctuated by a brief scalding interlude. I couldn't afford to keep the rest of the house properly heated either, so I stayed in bed a lot, drinking Bailey's straight from the bottle. The house began to be plagued by flies that seemed to live in the walls. They were dormant at night, probably because of the cold, but when the sun warmed them up they came buzzing out in hordes, and I spent hours stalking around the apartment swatting them. One night in December, when the temperature went down to 15 below, I took off all my clothes and ran around on the lawn naked just to see what it felt like.

Maine was trying to teach me something, but I was a slow learner. I thought I'd gone to Maine to face my demons and turn them into art, but it turned out that I couldn't face them, and not only that I couldn't even find them. I was trying to write about what I knew, which in itself probably wasn't a bad idea, but I was mistaken about what that was. I thought that what I knew most about was myself, but I could not have been more wrong. I didn't know the first thing about myself, and Maine wasn't going to teach me. You don't learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.