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Youth and what happens when it's gone

And what happens when it's gone.

One of his unpublished novels was about a seven-year-old boy who writes an elaborate science-fiction thriller in his school notebook, and when the manuscript is discovered by his teacher, he is skipped ahead a grade, and there encounters all the familiar plot points you’d expect in a coming-of-age story: bullies, crushes, etc. When you think of being young – when you think of Youth as a state of being – you might think about being twelve years-old and watching the opening credits of Silence of the Lambs on the VHS tape you bought secondhand at the video store with your allowance money. You might even think about Ted Tally, the writer who adapted Harris’ novel, who won an Oscar for it, who never found much success after that, and you might wonder where he is now, what he’s doing, and you might be disappoined that you never got a chance to meet him, the guy who penned all those oft-quoted Hannibal Lecter lines (even though they’re less quoted, now, than they used to be—culture, too, loses its Youth).

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