When Paul Auster can't decide what to do to become the kind of writer he wants to be, he decides to travel. He believes that this will help him develop his voice and find a way to do the writing he has it in him to do. Traveling does open Auster to other ways of life; for example, at one point he comes across a woman who believes that he's a god. During his travels, he's able to pay homage to his literary icons, like James Joyce, but also to create his own set of experiences to write from. The travel also opens him to a variety of strange types of work, like the time he translated the new Vietnamese constitution for a free meal.

Despite the lessons of many writer/workers who came before him, Auster doesn't believe he should have to have a normal career on the side of writing. He thinks that such a concept is too depressing to even contemplate. It's not that Auster doesn't have jobs—he does. He works as a landscaper and on an oil tanker at various points. But they're never career-oriented or office jobs that might help him have upward mobility. By shunning that trajectory, Auster gives himself two options: he can write and thrive, or not. If he didn't find the success that he did, he may have regretted shunning a career path. Ultimately the lessons he learned on his alternative path may have helped him grow as a writer. It's also possible that a fear of poverty helped drive him to continue to write when he might otherwise have not gotten the words on the page.

When Auster wrote Hand to Mouth, he was no longer living as a starving artist. Rather, he was a celebrated author and winner of many awards. His rejection of work and education would read quite differently if it was written by someone who never achieved his legacy. Auster's story shows that failure is only a step on the way to success. You can fail repeatedly and make many mistakes but still meet your goals in the long run. Auster never sees his failures as the work of others but regards them only as the result of his own actions. One example he shows is that of a detective novel he published under a pseudonym that never sold well. He blames himself for that, rather than the distribution. Soon after the end of the events in this book, though, Auster did find critical success.