The one thing every writer knows about writing is that you can’t make a living by it. Until you score a hit, you’ve got to support the habit with a steady paycheck. Michael Greenberg has spent much of his life trying to controvert this rule, with only partial success. For years he performed odd jobs—peddling cosmetics on the street, chauffeuring wealthy school children, sorting mail at the post office—chiefly for the purpose of writing about them. Eventually, the need to support a family got the best of him, but he remains an incurable scribbler, his mind constantly on the prowl for new material. His friends are apt to appear in published essays; his daughter is the subject of a bestselling memoir. Once, when his wife invited someone for dinner, he questioned the guest relentlessly, taking out a pen and notepad to jot down answers, for which he was scolded afterwards.
Beg, Borrow, Steal is a series of reflections on the hardships, delights, and moral dilemmas one encounters when trying to get through life primarily by means of stringing words together. Each of the book’s forty-four short chapters first appeared in the “Freelance” column of the Times Literary Supplement, in which Greenberg’s pieces alternate with those of the English critic Hugo Williams. Greenberg’s prose is everything Williams’s isn’t—efficient, understated, languidly witty.
In the title essay Greenberg remembers an orthodox teacher he had at the Beth-El school in Rockaway who objected
