Gary Shteyngart - Epilogue

The May 2024 issue of The Atlantic includes a piece by Gary Shteyngart describing his experience aboard the maiden voyage of the world's largest cruise ship. I've not had that experience, but I have visited places to write about them or do research. I enjoyed the place and was excited about the activity, but I felt slightly outside the experience just the same. I chalked it up to my personal version of Manny being Manny. Then, I read this in the epilogue to Shteyngart's piece. Maybe he and his writer friends are on to something.

... Throughout my voyage, my writer friends wrote in to commiserate with me. Sloane Crosley, who once covered a three-day spa mini-cruise for Vogue, tells me she felt “so very alone … I found it very untethering.” Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes in an Instagram comment: “When Gary is done I think it’s time this genre was taken out back and shot.” And he is right. To badly paraphrase Adorno: After this, no more cruise stories. It is unfair to put a thinking person on a cruise ship. Writers typically have difficult childhoods, and it is cruel to remind them of the inherent loneliness that drove them to writing in the first place ...

Does that resonate with you? Do you think there's any truth to this conclusion?