The Cliché

In the tumult of the 21^st century, Mao has chosen to be... an author?

What kind of masochist does that?

Yes, our bland, hetero, millennial hero, toxically oversexed and unfortunately Caucasian (in spite of an eyebrow-raising given name), has begun to fall prey, in his distinctly melancholy way, to that most pernicious of all clichés: the idea that an artist must suffer in order to create great art.

The question that naturally follows, it would seem, is whether such an innocuous and widely he...