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Part memoir, part handbook, part survey of the contemporary literary scene, Joan Frank’s Because You Have To: A Writing Life is a collection of essays that, taken together, provide a walking tour of the writing life. Frank’s aim is to form a coherent vision, one that may provide some communion about realities of the writer's vocation that have struck her as rarely revealed.
Frank offers what she has learned as a writer not only to other writers, but to those to whom good writing matters. Her insights about "thinking on paper" are never dogmatic or pontifical; rather, they are cordial and intellectually welcoming.
Original, witty, and practical, Frank ably steers us through the journey of her own life as a writer, as well as through the careers and work of other writers. Her subjects range widely, from the “boot camp” conditioning of marketing work to squaring off with rejection and envy; from sustaining belief in art’s necessity to the baffling subjectivity of literary perception and the magical books that nourish writers. Frank’s personal journey is wonderfully told, so that what in these essays is particular becomes useful and universal.
"Once in a blue moon a book on writing comes along that reads as though it's speaking directly to you. Because You Have To is just that: an honest and wise and brave account of what it means to be a writer in this odd new century. I recommend to you this rare thing, a book packed full of useful information that is also a work of art." —John McNally, author of After the Workshop
Joan Frank is the author of two story collections—In Envy Country (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize and the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award, and Boys Keep Being Born—and three novels: Make It Stay, The Great Far Away, and Miss Kansas City, which won the Michigan Literary Fiction Award. She lives in northern California.