By and large the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is after all a form of communication.
There's a lot of thought in art. People get to talk about important things. There's a lot of sex you know in art. There's a lot of naked women and men and there's intrigue there's fakery. It's a real microcosm of the larger world.