Daniel Mendelsohn recalls how reading the author for the first time transformed his ideas of love and writing:
Discovering Proust was a real shock—it was the shock of recognition. I was twenty, and going through a rough patch in my love life. It gave me a shock that, I believe, is felt by every gay person reading Proust for the first time—the unsatisfied desires and the frustration I harbored had not only been felt by someone else but, even more extraordinarily, they were the subject of a great book. When I read Swann’s Way, it wasn’t the description of homosexual desire that touched me—because it’s practically absent in that volume—but something much more general, the description of unreciprocated desire, and above all, the astounding revelation that desire can’t endure its own satisfaction. We see that exemplified in Swann in Love. When Swann succeeds in physically possessing Odette, when she ceases to escape him, his desire for her vanishes. For me … that was a revelation as well as a recognition.
And then I had another kind of shock. Thanks to Proust, I found a certain consolation in thinking that all artistic creation is a substitute for frustration and disappointment—that art feeds on our failures. Back then, I remember thinking to myself, I can’t get what I want anyway, I may as well become a writer!
The Dish 