Maybe the issue I took with MFA could be more simple than that; one didn't need to manufacture a shadowy cabal of the elite, laughing as we—the reading public—eagerly lapped up the hubristic detritus of their patrician parables. There was already enough trite juxtaposition and cynical self-help-section cashgrab baked into the title to raise one's hackles—successful writers writing to non-successful writers because that is the audience that would swallow it:
Fucking MFA programs. The students were arrogant because they had been accepted by this fancy program. They were also desperate to believe they had done the right thing—that being there would help them, change them, save them in some way.
Apply the same pathos to the hardship writers of NYC’s East Village—desperate to justify their thousand-dollar-a-month bedroom sublet—and you get the same outcome. MFA vs NYC; paean to a life well wasted.
But all my grousing fell away as the sheer volume of excerpts and quotations piled up. As I reviewed them, thinking of how to review the book, I recognized that different voices surged and different perspectives clashed; nothing was stable, nothing pushed an agenda. What I had latched onto—from the Raffles incident—was preconceived; I brought it to the book, rather than pulling it from its pages: