Nonfiction | January 05, 2015
Some Notes on Success
Daniel Torday
What did it mean to be twenty-four? I would like to know how I would have defined success. I know what I desired: to be a rock star and a twenty-four-year-old novelist, in that order. But success is not simply the fulfillment of desire, and I was not yet a rock star or a novelist. I was, after all, twenty-four. I was an editor at a national magazine and a bluegrass mandolin player, both of which were like what I desired, and not. I was living in Fort Greene, Brooklyn and working in Midtown Manhattan. I was full of ambition. I had not the slightest inkling of how to get what I wanted.
This essay is currently not available online.
If you are a student, faculty member, or staff member at an institution whose library subscribes to Project Muse, you can read this piece and the full archives of the Missouri Review for free. Check this list to see if your library is a Project Muse subscriber.
Want to read more?
Subscribe TodaySEE THE ISSUE
SUGGESTED CONTENT
Editors' Prize Winner
Apr 16 2024
How to Love Animals
How To Love Animals We never planned to get goats. In fact, we’d told ourselves that goats were off limits. My wife, Anna, and I were living in the middle… read more
Nonfiction
Apr 16 2024
My Cape Disappointment
My Cape Disappointment It was named by a British fur trader who’d been looking for the mouth of the Columbia River. Dejected, the fur trader gave up the search, tacked… read more
Nonfiction
Apr 16 2024
The Birds
The Birds In the middle of watching Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds with my family in our basement TV room, circa 1969, when I was nine, I was sent to the… read more