Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (Who sent an amazing blurb because he’s married to Beth Ann and he sounds like my uncles and seems like he would pick you up at the train station at three o’clock in the morning, even if he hadn’t been drinking.)
Neil White, author of In the Sanctuary of Outcasts (Who sent an amazing blurb because he also wrote a memoir about the South and kept saying I had amazing talent, and having people in my life who tell me I’m amazing is very important to me.)
There was one other, a famous funny writer I won’t name by name, who sent me an angry email telling me I possessed the writing skill of a bucket of chum because I wrote things like “the writing skill of a bucket of chum.” This unnamed super-famous writer then commenced to diagram several of my chum-like sentences for me right there in the body of the email and just got really angry at me for some reason. Then the next day he sent another email in which he praised my writing and sounded like maybe he’d gotten back on his meds. Very odd. Years later, I met this famous man, at an event where we were the two featured writers. The subject of my blurb request did not come up. I bought him a drink. He seemed to be on his meds.
It feels weird, asking people to say nice things about you so you can tell others what they said, like airbrushing compliments you’ve received on a T-shirt and then wearing that shirt to a job interview, which is actually not a bad idea.
If I had been asked to supplicate myself for blurbs a few years ago, I would have laughed, because back then, I had dignity. But I no longer had dignity. I had been robbed of this quality by debt, and by my daughters. If Debbie had told me that I could get a book deal by removing my pants and riding a unicycle down the cereal aisle, my only question would’ve been: Should we film it for the website?
It took a total of three months to write the book proposal, which was 114 pages and 36,795 words long, longer than The Old Man and the Sea. I was the old man. My book was the fish. My wife and daughters were the boat. God was the water. Debbie was the hook.
Summer was over, fall happened. I taught my classes and pretended like my life was not about to change. Tom Clancy died that October. Debbie was on CNN, discussing him. It was thrilling, seeing my agent on television.
“That is my agent,” I said to the children. “There she is.”
We recorded her on TV and watched it over and over again like the moon landing. That’s what it felt like. We had landed on the moon, or were about to.
A few days after Thanksgiving, Debbie called.
“We’ve got an offer,” she said.
Chapter 10
There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.
—SECRETARY OF DEFENSE DONALD RUMSFELD
ONE KNOWN KNOWN IS THIS: IN 1984, TOM CLANCY SOLD The Hunt for Red October to the Naval Institute Press for $5,000. Another: In 1987, Donald Trump sold The Art of the Deal to Random House for $500,000, half of which he paid somebody else to write it for him. This is not uncommon, for celebrities to pay others to write their books for them, certain celebrities lacking the requisite tools to write their own books, such as time, or souls.
Both aforementioned books sold in the millions, which means both books made tens of millions. Most books by a major publisher sell an average of nobody knows how many copies. A thousand? Ten thousand? If your book sells in the millions, you will never have a car that doesn’t smell new, ever again, if that’s what you’re into.
In the 1990s, David Sedaris signed a two-book deal with Little, Brown and Company in “the low five figures,” which could mean $10,000 or $40,000 or some other number. His third book, Naked (1997), sold in “the low seven figures,” which probably means one-point-something-million dollars. Two, maybe?
More than a decade later, Random House paid Lena Dunham $3.7 million for Not That Kind of Girl, and then paid Aziz Ansari $3.7 million for Modern Romance. Simon & Schuster paid Hillary Clinton $8 million for Living History and Knopf paid Pope John Paul II $8.75 million for Crossing the Threshold of Hope. These are all famous people, it should be noted, and everybody buys books by famous people, especially if the famous people write the book themselves, because these famous people, in addition to souls, have what’s called a “platform” from which to say things, while most of us are down with the groundlings. The Pope could write a diet book called Running Up Golgotha: Behold the Body of a Lowly Carpenter in 40 Days and Nights and it would sell in the millions, easy, because a famous human wrote it.
When Debbie called to tell me about the offer, she did not say the word million. I know; I listened super hard for it. She was calling about a “pre-emptive offer,” she said, which meant I had twenty-four hours to accept or decline it.
“You can’t breathe a word of this,” she said. “It’s got to be confidential.”
“Like eBay,” I said.
“No. Not at all like eBay.”
“How much?” I said, bracing.
“A hundred thousand,” she said. “You have twenty-four hours to accept or decline.”
Did she just say $100,000?
“Say it again,” I said.
“A hundred thousand dollars,” she said.
Galaxies reeled inside me.
This is a lot of money to anyone, or at least it was to me, whose father was born with no indoor plumbing and rode a mule to town, a real one, not imaginary. The sound of the number, hundred thousand, riffled through my heart like arcade tokens. I wanted to share the sound of these words with my wife, but worried. Lauren had grown up in want, too, her father as vexed as mine, a childhood of evictions and hurried crosstown moves in borrowed cars to another new rental. This was not just money. This was the first paragraph of a new chapter in a new story. The words hundred and thousand might make her eyes go spiral. She might demand I take it. But I wanted more. No, I would not tell Lauren.
I told Lauren.
“Holy crap,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
She was right. This crap was holy. Her eyes went spiral.
In one six-figure number, every ridiculous and impossible thing we’d done together cohered into this vision of paradise. We held each other for so long it upset the children.
That night, we made sweet love. Actually, no. We got out the calculator and decided what we could pay off first.
* * *
“I don’t think we should take it,” I said. “We can get more.”
“Are you sure?”
“No.”
“We’re going to be rich,” Lauren said.
“What are you thinking?” I said.
“Bathrooms,” she said. “A stove with a real vent.”
“A vent would be nice.”
“A vent would change my life,” she said, getting a little weepy.
“Vents in every toilet,” I said. “And college for the girls.”
“Vents and college. And toilets,” she said.
“Goddang it, I love you,” I said.
Should we hold out for more? How very odd and thrilling, finally to have the privilege of being the one to say no. You hear a lot these days about the power of yes, and yes will get you far. But be not fooled by the happy yessing of your office retreat’s spiritual leaders. Yes is the air in the carburetor that starts the engine of your dreaming, but no is your choke. No is what pays the mortgage every month, what keeps the budget in order, what keeps the mule going straight. The right no at the right time takes just as much courage and imagination as a yes.
The risk, of course, is that the next offer would be far lower than $100,000. It came down to who was more desperate—us, to get money, or them, to get my book. If they perceived my potential refusal as overly haughty, they might decide I was too big for my britches and lower the offer, to show me who really had the biggest melon at this county fair.
When does confiden
ce in one’s talent bleed into vainglory? So much of art is submission—to contests, juries, magazines, editors, self, truth, the volatility of the imagination and the everlasting duress of the human condition and the animating spirit of the universe. But isn’t it also true that so much of art is an act of ridiculous bravado?
Look at me! Look what I made! Look what I can do! Be dazzled by my technique! Be enchanted by this beauty I have manifested for your delight! Be illuminated by these truths which are not self-evident to you but perhaps are to me! Tickets can be purchased at the door! No flash photography, please!
These two vexing poles of art—the meek and the haughty—are found in all creative dreaming. The former is required to make art; the latter to sell it. Part of me wanted to say, Yes, please, let us take the offer and also volunteer to wash the feet and cars of everyone at HarperCollins, should they desire it, yes, please, thank you.
The other part of me wanted more money.
Lauren and I sat down. We prayed about it, which we almost never do, honestly, because she always starts laughing, and because I always end up saying something inappropriate mid-prayer, like, “Jesus, take the wheel.”
But not this time.
“Make us wiser than we are,” I prayed. “Give us wisdom, so that we may see the right fruits of our labor, so that we may have vents for our bathroom facilities and stoves.”
And I said, “Amen,” and looked at my beautiful, funny wife, this woman who had hitched her harness to the mule of a dream that had dragged us into sloughs of shit and want.
“Do you trust me?” I said.
“I do,” she said.
I called Debbie.
“We’ll pass,” I said.
We gave it up just like that—$100,000.
“What did we just do?” Lauren said. “Oh, no.”
And I said, “Jesus, take the wheel.”
* * *
“Your life is about to change,” an editor from Simon & Schuster said.
We spoke on the phone, while I was in my truck, in a parking lot, after class.
He told me what books he’d edited, and I knew them, had heard the great goddess herself, Terry Gross, interviewing the authors of these books.
I spoke to editor after editor of every major publishing house, and minor ones, also. It was amazing, I won’t lie. When you’ve spent the last decade working up the courage to tell yourself you’re amazing, even when it seems that the world is going to the prom without you, and then one day people who can see One World Trade Center from their offices call and say you’re amazing and ask if you would be their date to the prom, they got you a corsage and everything, it’s hard to process. I grew several inches taller that week.
“Everybody loves the book,” Debbie said.
“I haven’t even written it yet.”
“I know, it’s amazing,” she said.
“The humor!” editors said.
“The story!” they said.
“The relationships!” they said.
“The World’s Largest Man,” they said, “Great title. Just perfect!”
“Slap me,” I said to Lauren.
She slapped me.
Debbie came back with news: A dozen publishers would be bidding on the book. A dozen. I could die. I did die. I called Mark.
“What the fuck,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
“What the fucking fuck.”
“I know.”
The auction was set for a Thursday.
I flew down to New Orleans to do some writing workshops for high school students, and Mark used his endless supply of free plane tickets to join me and sprawl across the hotel room. He wanted to be there when it happened.
Debbie called.
“It is finished,” she said.
She told me the number.
I rolled off the bed.
Mark fell out of his chair.
I called Lauren, who fell off the back of the couch.
I called my parents.
“Who bought it?” Mom said.
“HarperCollins,” I said. They had been the first to offer, and the last.
“Is that a good one?” she said.
I tried to explain that my book had just been purchased by a company who also published Gabriel García Márquez, C. S. Lewis, Annie Dillard, Richard Ford, Dostoevsky, and Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga.
To Kill a Mothereffing Mockingbird.
I tried to explain that HarperCollins was the publisher of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the most popular book of the nineteenth century, a book that started a war, according to President Lincoln. Would my book start a war? Fingers crossed!
“Well, how much did you get?” Pop said.
There was so much I wanted to tell him, and I didn’t know how. I would have to tell him these things in my book, which I now had to write. He would find out what I really thought and felt about him, and us, and everything else that mattered.
We would have to talk it out. That was fine. I was ready.
I’d done it. I’d sold a book for more money than my father had ever imagined any of us might see, this side of a drug-related felony.
Should I tell Pop how much they were paying me? I’d tell him. I told him.
“Oh,” Mom said. “Oh!”
“Heck, son. That’s a fine skill!”
And he laughed. He laughed wildly. We all did.
Chapter 11
They, no matter what the motivating force—death, love or God—made jokes.
—NATHANAEL WEST, Miss Lonelyhearts
BACK IN SAVANNAH, NOT LONG AFTER WE GOT NEWS OF THE book deal, while carrying a sack of groceries down a sidewalk, my father died. I cried for three months. I looked at my book contract and saw how much money they were paying me and cried even more. This moment—when I saw with my own eyes, on a sheet of paper, how much someone was going to pay me for creative services rendered—was the closest I had ever come to that impossible twinkling juncture in space-time in which the dream potentiates from abstracted fantasia to incarnate life-reality. For educational purposes, I will tell you how much they paid me, because it seems silly not to—$305,000. I wanted my father to see the check, to hold it, but he would never hold it.
It’s not a lot of money, if you’re used to money, if your mother’s a surgeon or your father owns many luxurious properties, but if you’re me, then this money is a boon of the mythic kind, granting the powers to transport you from one place in life to a whole other. It means your children will have a qualitatively more abundant reality than yours, if you can put the money to work. If you can make good on the promises the money was meant to seal.
We had no generational wealth, is what I mean, neither Lauren nor me. Years earlier, her father had vanished like a David Lynch character, never to be heard from again, and her mother’s long illness used up what money was left. When Pop died, after a lifetime of toil, the bourgeois mirage hanging there, just out of reach, he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bank of America, with no house to show for it. Mom turned out to be the wealthy one.
“I never had reason to spend any of it,” she said, in the days after Pop’s death, as I studied her retirement savings, with relief.
“You’ll be fine,” I told her. “You’ll live comfortably enough to get your eyebrows waxed whenever you want.”
“I don’t need much,” she said. “Everything I need is gone.”
Her grief would carry on, for years, an endless bolt of indigo stretching out as far as she could see. He had been her protector, and she had been his. What was left for her?
“Go finish your book,” she said.
But how do you finish writing a funny book when its central figure has just flown to his mansion over the hilltop? It wasn’t supposed to end like that.
“So this book is about us?” Mom asked.
“Yes.”
“Who’s the star of this book?” she asked. “Me?”
She still had her sense of humor, even in grief.
“Sharks,” I said. “It’s about sharks.”
“And me?”
“Yes. You and sharks.”
“Are you going to reveal all our family secrets?” she said.
“I’m going to tell everyone that you have no eyebrows.”
But there was nothing in the book about her eyebrows, or about anything, for there was no book. Debbie had sold it on proposal, and the book was only half-finished. The hard part, the ending, lay hiding inside the chaos of grief. Debbie sent lilies for the funeral, but they felt like flowers to grieve the death of the dream. I had wrested my destiny from the angel of the Lord’s monstrous terrifying hand and had come away with something I didn’t want. Could I finish a hilarious and captivating book, even when sandbagged with mourning? It had been impossible enough to create the magic when everything was fine: Could I make the magic when everything was not?
“Don’t worry about the book,” Debbie said.
But I worried. It wasn’t just a book: It was a declaration of love and meaning to and about everything that was important to me, my father, mother, wife, children. It’s not like I’d been writing a science fantasy thriller, with robotic dragons and elf droids and topless witches. I was living inside this very real human comedy, and the story had now jumped the rails and was heading to Sad-ville with a full head of melancholy steam.
* * *
It was spring of 2014 now. I was thirty-eight years old, twenty years since my brain-melting vision. Had it been that long? I was now chair of liberal arts at the college and getting up earlier, staying up later, stretching every spare moment to finish the book. I started writing at home to help Lauren more with the children, who had begun defecating around the house in teams.
The children sometimes toddled in and found me weeping at my writing table. This was real weeping, funereal weeping. I was mourning something deep inside that had been hiding there for a long, long time.
“What’s wrong, Daddy?” they said.
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m just writing.”
“Why are you crying?”
“It’s just a very funny book.”
The weird news about my grief is that it was now, or would soon be, absolutely public. This is what happens when the book you’re writing is about the man you’re now grieving, and everybody wanted to know about this book.
Congratulations, Who Are You Again? Page 12