David Gilmour's Open Book, Part Three

Gilmour: Yeah, I feel that way with this one, to be absolutely honest with you. You're the first person to ask this, and the first person I am going to tell is you: I have serious doubts these days about whether I'll write another novel. I feel like I have hit the absolute bottom of my personal experience with this novel; I felt like I went right to the bottom of the tank and I felt like I got everything that's there. And I feel now that I'm condemned now to write How Boys See Girls Part 2, How Boys See Girls Part 4 . . . . I just wrote half a novel since I published Lost Between Houses and I looked at it and thought, "this is How Boys See Girls Part 2 -- there's not a new thing in it. You can't publish that book twice." And then I wrote a half a novel that turned out -- guess what -- like an imitation Chekhov novella. Then a friend of mine took me aside and said, "maybe you should just stop writing completely for two years, stop thinking about writing novels and just do the odd review." That's what I'm doing because I really feel like I am not up for it and there's nothing else. I feel like I blew it all with this book. I blew even the steam to want to do it.

Kirman: So what are you going to do for the next two years?

Gilmour: I don't know; I honestly don't know. I am having an authentic, real crisis. I haven't the faintest idea what to do. I'm not feeling sorry for myself but I feel like at the moment everything I can think of doing I've already done so it seems it's the rather depressing spectacle of another girlfriend, another novel, another TV show but it all seems more of the same rather than something fresh. The guy from Maclean's said to me, he knew me thirty years ago at the University of Toronto, and he said, 'you know what you should do? You should write poetry." He said, "I remember you actually had a little bit of a flair for it and you never pursued it. That way

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