russian doll writers

Do you ever notice a theme connecting the books you seemingly choose at random to read? I have a major theme running through recent reads and I've only just realised it. I keep reading writers who are writing about writers - and in one case a writer who is writing about a writer who is writing about a writer. It's like a nest of Russian dolls, one inside the other. Perhaps, subconsciously, I am choosing books with this theme, in fact the more I think about it the more likely it seems.

In a previous post I wrote how much I enjoyed Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon, a book about an author with writer's block who teams up with a would be young novelist. Since then I have read The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer about a boy who deals with his mental health issues by writing and sketching in a journal. Then I read Oracle Night by Paul Auster about a writer who buys a blue notebook to begin writing again in order to help heal himself after a terrible accident. He writes a story about an editor prompted into a drastic life change when an unpublished manuscript, the titular Oracle Night, falls into his hands. Most recently I read The Fault in Our Stars by John Green about two terminally ill teenagers and their quest to meet a reclusive author, half the world away, in order to find out what happened to the characters in his one and only book after the story finishes.

Of course, these books are about much else besides writers and books and stories, and it's only just occurred to me as I write this, they are all about illness, in one form or another, and the power that stories and writing have to help heal lives.

Perhaps a blog about fictional books about writers and writing would be an interesting project. I'll certainly, more consciously, keep my eyes open for more books with this theme. The illness/writing/healing angle is interesting too. I'll ponder that some more.