"'You're going to have to do something, Max. I can’t handle it by
myself anymore,' she said one morning over breakfast. 'Some of the
bills are going unpaid. I didn't want to tell you last month, but....'
Max Zajack is in trouble. His writing career isn't taking off, and
now he has a wife and a child to feed.
To what extent can an artist survive the needs of a day-to-day
existence? And to what excesses can frustrated ambition ultimately
drive Max Zajack?
The Artistic Life is the sixth of Mark SaFranko's series of Max Zajack books, charting Max's life into middle aged respectability opposed with his endless and eye-opening need to be an artist.
The book is introduced by the soon to be made Hollywood film On The Brinks author Sam Millar, who writes: "No one writes about writers,
their heartbreaks and tribulations, as
authentically as SaFranko. Little wonder he is frequently compared to
as the heir of the great Charles Bukowski."
'I knew what it meant -- I was going to have to come up with a job.
A real job. To hell with writing, to hell with acting, to hell with my
rich fantasy life of fat, regular royalty checks and reliable agents
and all the other pleasant hallucinations of the artist manque in
America.
'A simmering rage ate at me. Years of unrelenting work and I was
back at square one. It was always the same old story. I was
doomed. And I wasn't getting any younger."
[Mark SaFranko, The Artistic Life]