I wrote Headshot because I wanted to remember what it felt like to be obsessed with playing a sport that nobody was watching. Many literary sports narratives, such as Joyce Carol Oates’s On Boxing, don’t help me remember this feeling because they are texts that are primarily interested in what it feels like to watch a sport, but there are some, rarer, narratives that circle what it feels like to play a sport, what it feels like to be solitary and embodied, and when I read those texts I am able to see a sliver of a former self. Reading those rare texts is like standing on the street at night and, through a large glass illuminated window, watching a former me walk brazenly around in a house unaware. It’s uncanny, and intoxicating, to glimpse a past self like that. Narratives that make me feel this way, that remind me what it feels like to be obsessed with playing a sport, electrify me.
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