Parenting & Family Quote by Manuel Puig

Puig is confessing a problem that haunts anyone who comes to art through devotion: the first drafts of imagination often arrive wearing someone else’s clothes. The line pivots on a cruel little split between process and product. Scripts “excited” him while they were being made because imitation can feel like creation in real time; it delivers the adrenaline of cinema without the risk of originality. The disappointment comes at the finish line, when the spell breaks and the work reveals itself as ventriloquism - not homage, not critique, just a “simple copy.”

The subtext is less self-flagellation than diagnosis. Childhood movies aren’t just influences; they’re an early emotional grammar. Puig, who would later build novels out of gossip, melodrama, and the textures of mass culture, is admitting that pop forms imprint so deeply they can colonize your creative instincts. His honesty also clarifies why his mature work doesn’t try to outrun that imprint. Instead of pretending to be “above” cinema, he learns to metabolize it: to treat borrowed plots and voices as raw material, to expose how desire and identity get scripted by the stories we consume.

There’s context in the medium shift, too. A script is designed to disappear into a film; it’s a blueprint, not a voice. Puig’s irritation hints at a novelist discovering that literature can do what a copycat screenplay can’t: make the act of copying visible, turn fandom into form, and turn the private archive of childhood viewing into something sharper than nostalgia.