The Inventors

by Peter Selgin

  …Well, you get the idea. My brother, if not exactly a liar, can’t be taken at his word.

  Does this sort of thing make The Inventors phony? Supposing it did, so what? Plenty of famous memoirists have taken great liberties with the truth. And the most self-avowedly candid ones have tended to take the biggest liberties of all. Look at St. Augustine. Or Rousseau.

  But The Inventors isn’t phony in the sense of pretending to be anything other than what it is. Peter never claims that it’s entirely candid or accurate. On the contrary, he warns his readers again and again against assuming that he is merely telling the truth. His book’s title is itself a warning. It is a book about inventors whose inventions consist of myths they’ve spun about themselves. It is, most obviously, a book about two inventors: our father and our eighth-grade English teacher. But it is mostly about a third inventor, Peter himself, and his own creations, whose patent specification you are holding.

  Since he asked me to write this afterword, Peter has also been pestering me to tell him what I think of The Inventors. I have not answered him, but now that I’ve said as much as I have about the book, I’m prepared to do so. The Inventors is at times beautiful and at others exasperating. It has brought back to me wonderful memories and also very sad ones. It has made me want to fling parts of it across the room and to read others again and again. It is to me, in short, everything that my brother himself is to me.

  Do I like The Inventors? Of course not. I love it.

  Acknowledgements

  THANKS TO THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE:

  Walter Cummins, Kate St. Ives, Sarah Krahulik Lenz, Sandra Worsham, Peter Nichols, Fred Eberstadt, Ed Farr, Elizabeth Anne Socolow, Michael Nethercott, and Patrick Dillon, who gave feedback on early drafts of this work.

  My good colleagues Martin Lammon, Allen Gee, Laura Newbern, and Aubrey Hirsch.

  Steve Heller, Hawaiian-shirted mensch.

  My beautiful mother.

  My sisters Ann and Clare.

  My agent Christopher Rhodes – savvy, sensitive, stalwart.

  Rhonda Hughes, intrepid publisher, superb editor.

  Lidia Yuknavitch, for graciously providing an introduction.

  The memory of my friend and swimming buddy Oliver Sacks.

  And my brother George, who, as always, gets the last word.