by Gary Indiana
The book: It has turned out radically different than I expected. At some point I began to prune away anything suggesting the sort of “triumph over adversity” theme that gongs through much of the so-called memoir genre, paring away most evidence of my eventual career as a writer and artist—which has not, in any case, been an unmitigated triumph over adversity. I’m almost sixty-five, I still have practically nothing of my own, and could very well end up on the same trash heap where most old people in America get tossed, regardless of whatever “cultural capital” I’ve accumulated.
Eventually I let go of any pretense of documentary reality, and kept instead the evocation of things happening to a person for the first time, of being young and completely unprepared for life. This inevitably brought Ferd Eggan into it more conspicuously than a different vector of narrative would have. I see that I’ve concluded it when Ferd and I separately departed Los Angeles in 1978. That was hardly the end of our dealings, though we had no contact at all for almost a decade; on a book tour for my first novel, I spent some days in Chicago, and suddenly there he was again. After that we stayed in touch, sometimes cohabited, a few times traveled together; I haven’t told the story of his life here, but rather the part of it that repeatedly intersected with mine. Ferd really deserves his own book; someone else will have to write it.
First published in the United States of America in 2015 by
Rizzoli Ex Libris, an imprint of
Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.
300 Park Avenue South
New York, NY 10010
www.rizzoliusa.com
Copyright © 2015 Gary Indiana
All photographs © Gary Indiana
Excerpt on this page by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by Lloyd Alexander, from Nausea, copyright © 1964 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Cover photograph by Don Hunstein
Design by Murray & Sorrell FUEL
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior consent of the publishers.
2015 2016 2017 2018 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Distributed to the U.S. trade by Random House, New York
ISBN-13: 978-0-8478-4686-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015937550