I want to talk about the experience of reading a great book and then reading everything the author wrote and finding that nothing else is as good. This happens regularly and the appropriate response is not to be angry about it but to understand that some books are achieved rather than produced — they happen when a writer's abilities, interests, and circumstances align in a way that can't be engineered.

Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird at thirty-four and nothing comparable afterward. Ralph Ellison wrote Invisible Man and spent the rest of his life on a second novel he never completed. Donna Tartt writes every decade and the first novel (The Secret History) is the best one.

This pattern says something about the relationship between a writer and their best book. The best book is sometimes the answer to a question the writer asked once and couldn't ask again.