<![CDATA[Writing As If You Were Dead]]>Hitch once wrote that "a serious person should try to write posthumously...one should compose as if the usual constraints—of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public and, perhaps especially, intellectual opinion—did not operate." The novelist Jeffrey Eugendies, speaking at an awards ceremony for young writers, pivots off that passage to offer advice for his audience:
All of the constraints Hitchens mentions have one thing in common: they all represent a deformation of the self.