Life & Wisdom Quote by Manuel Puig

Puig is smuggling a defense of excess into what sounds like a confession. The line insists that “complicated” isn’t a glamorous adjective or a coy pose; it’s a formal problem. If your inner life arrives as contradictions, digressions, backstory, and unresolved desire, a short story’s clean arc can feel like a lie. A movie, with its hunger for visible action and decisive closure, can be another kind of betrayal. The novel, by contrast, is the one container roomy enough to let mess stay messy and still be legible.

The subtext is craft as self-treatment, but not in the soft-focus way people talk about “healing.” Puig’s “personal therapy” is a working method: the page becomes a controlled space where the author can stage shame, obsession, nostalgia, and fantasy without having to tidy them into a moral. That’s especially resonant given Puig’s signature approach - melodrama, popular culture, gossip, letters, and dialogue - the very stuff literary gatekeepers used to dismiss as “not serious.” He flips that hierarchy. The so-called trash of everyday feeling is exactly where the serious material lives.

Context matters: Puig wrote from the pressures of mid-century Argentina, censorship, exile, and queer life lived under surveillance. For writers in that orbit, the novel isn’t just longer; it’s safer and more subversive, a way to encode what can’t be said directly. Calling it therapy is both honest and tactical: it reframes the novel not as prestige, but as necessity.