How Jonathan Franzen Learned To Stop Worrying (Sort Of)

He's not completely cured. In conversation Franzen is still a little anxious and nerdy, and he throws in monster 30-second pauses while he agonizes--literally, he looks as if he's in agony--over precisely what word to say. He still wears horn-rims. He asks several times if he's being interesting. He can't resist throwing out weird little factoids that have adhered to his sticky, hyper-retentive mind (according to Franzen, 43% of Subaru owners are Republicans; every person in the continental U.S. lives within one mile of an owl; scrub jays kill an estimated 100 million songbirds a year in California alone). And writing is still a struggle. He works in a darkened room, with earplugs, noise-canceling headphones and something called pink noise (it's like white noise but with more bass) playing in the background. "You think, my God, I've been writing for 20 or 25 years, I ought to recognize in half a day when I'm on the wrong track," he says ruefully. "You wonder how on earth you ever wrote anything that didn't suck."

You can cut down on fear and embarrassment and disappointment, but you can never quite go cold turkey. "The double bind, the problem of consciousness mixed with nothingness, never goes away," Franzen writes in The Discomfort Zone. And he never does find that owl. But somehow it doesn't really bother him. "Much of bird watching is about disappointment," he says. "Part of the appeal is that really, more often than not, you don't see what you're looking for. The great pursuits are more about failure than about success."