Meg Wolitzer, author of the novel The Interestings, makes the argument that success is more frequently lauded than talent in our noisy, Internet-fueled world. Talent can be easily overlooked or misunderstood. Meanwhile, our culture demands an ever constant stream of people to fill our appetites for that “bottomless, fathomless” state of success, the glitz and the glamor and the thrill, and frequently the illusion, of having made it.
“The two continue to be spoken of interchangeably, when in truth the first is the real deal, and the latter is simply the fairy dust that sometimes gets sprinkled on the real deal, and other times gets puzzlingly sprinkled on the mediocre, or the fraudulent, or the happened-to-be-there-at-the-right-time,” she writes.