Dillard’s big finish?

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The one time in my adult life that I ever stopped writing for an extended period, I was in a bad mood for months. That’s why I’m dubious when writers announce that they’re retiring — I just don’t think it’s possible. Kurt Vonnegut famously decided to stop writing in 1997 after the publication of his final novel, “Timequake”; in 1999, he published three (yes, three) books, and later contributed pieces to the progressive magazine In These Times — pieces that became the basis for his 2005 bestseller “A Man Without a Country.” Alice Munro made similar noises late last year after the publication of her short-story collection “The View from Castle Rock,” only to tell interviewers of the stories she still intended to write.

The latest writer to announce retirement plans is Annie Dillard, the 62-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” and a dozen or so other works. Dillard has just published her second novel, “The Maytrees,” but New York magazine is reporting that this is it for her. “I’m tired,” Dillard told Daniel Asa Rose in an item for the magazine’s Intelligencer column. “I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.”

That’s a lovely sentiment, but I remain unconvinced. Writing, after all, is less a vocation than an obsession, a disorder of the blood. Even J.D. Salinger, hiding out for 40-plus years in New Hampshire, has reportedly produced an office full of manuscripts for release after his death. And though Dillard has never made any bones about the fact that writing is a struggle — “I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend,” she acknowledged in her 1989 book “The Writing Life” — 62 is awfully young to give it up.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Dillard write again.

David L. Ulin