“Get in here with us, Mama!” these strangers would say.
I’d snuggle up to Junior and Mama and whomever else, grinning. I was now being contacted by readers in foreign countries, such as Scotland and Texas. I was very big in Denmark, according to one person I didn’t know from Denmark. My ego was moving now across the turning hulk of the planet Earth like the British fleet. My little phone could barely hold power in those heady days, so many messages I received.
Heard you on the radio, they said.
Dude you were just on NPR, they said.
All Things Considered!!! they said.
When are you coming to Austin?
Come to Chicago!
Seattle!
L.A.!
My book continued to climb the rankings, such that, if this publicity continued unabated, I might very soon live among the top one hundred authors on Amazon, with Stephen King, George R. R. Martin, J. R. R. Tolkien, J. K. R. R. Rowling, and Nicholas P.T.S.D. Sparks. Also on this list are a surprising number of human people I’d never heard of, who wrote joke books and children’s books and books about men who shapeshift, mostly into sexy bears and sensual mountain cats. That summer, a man named Terry Bolryder sat triumphantly among the top one hundred authors on Amazon. His titles include:
Bear to the End
Bear to the Rescue
Bear to the Bone
Bear-ly a Hero
Remem-Bear Me
Big Strong Bear
Big Bad Bear
Big Sexy Bear
It makes you question everything you think you thought you knew about how the book business works, when you read a list like that.
* * *
In 1984, not long after Debbie edited The Hunt for Red October and before it was made into a major motion picture starring Alec Baldwin and Sean Connery, Clancy’s book lay dormant in boxes in the back room of the Naval Institute Press, where Debbie then worked as a young editor, not long out of the University of Virginia. She convinced her publisher to publish the book, and they did, because she said it was fantastic, and it was. But how would the world find out about it? What do you do?
Clancy, about my age at the time, was still in Baltimore underwriting small policies for boat insurance and term life. After a decade of writing novels in his spare time, he’d finally got one published, but it was no bestseller. Why? Because nobody knew about it.
“Word of mouth,” Debbie always said. “That’s how you sell a book.”
Which was another way of saying “small advertising budget.”
Tom! she must have said to him, in 1984. What this book needs is word of mouth! People are going to read your book and fall in love with the highly specific technical descriptions of submarine propulsion and will tell all their friends.
The book lay dormant, at the bottom of the ocean of publicity, and then: And then! Somebody gave a copy to the leader of the free world.
It could’ve ended there, because you know they’ve got this storage closet under the White House where these gifts go, a hundred yards deep—golf clubs, commemorative wine keys, monogrammed dishtowels—but somehow, they got Clancy’s little submarine book to President Reagan and he read some of it, and one day a journalist asked what he was reading and he told them. They printed it in a magazine, and today the studious insurance man is now one of the bestselling writers in human history, alongside Dr. Seuss and God.
This is not to say Clancy had no talent. He had more talent than the Rand Corporation has ways to end human life. I’m just saying, if you don’t have a sitting US president to tell the free world how talented you are, your book might not float. It’s not the fame that you want per se, but the thing the fame gets you, which in my case was some new window treatments for Lauren. This is why fame matters. It is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
What I needed was famous people to christen me. It could be Dave Chappelle or Bono or Dora the Explorer. It didn’t matter. If somebody posted an Instagram photo of Meryl Streep batting away a hornet with my hardcover, if Vladimir Putin called my book a book for babies, then that’s it: I would be a bestseller. Go get you some curtains, honey!
But if nobody famous talks about your book, there’s a very large chance it will live forever on the sea floor of the American consciousness, cold, dark, forgotten, filled with the skeletons of ambition and a mortgage you’ll have to pay off in monthly installments, like some kind of indentured servant, or your parents.
It’s shocking to the meritocratic American mind to see how the lead role in the drama of your success, to some extent, is played by Luck. The storyline of the American dream says that you are the protagonist: You call the shots. You take the raw materials of your DNA and life experience and develop a work ethic, a furious dedication to cultivate and shape your own talent and life arrangement in order to manifest your inmost vocational desires, such that you spend decades summoning the storm of your dream, only to find that at the witching hour, whence comes the time for your success to go national, you find yourself sitting in a hotel room really hoping Rihanna decides to wear your book on her head at the Met Gala.
* * *
For the time being, while patiently praying for God to compel Reese Witherspoon to post an inspiring Instagram photo of my book resting peacefully next to a rosewater-infused breakfast smoothie, I needed something to occupy my hands, and so what I did was work very hard to encourage very intelligent non–Reese Witherspoonians to compose other thoughts about my book via interviews on the Internet and the radio, as well as an obscure means of communication referred to by paleontologists as “print media.”
The hazards of interviews are many, especially when you write a funny book. You are expected to be hilarious, and if you are not, you will feel you have disappointed the interviewers. You can hear it in their voices. You will have to toggle back and forth from one state of being to the other with frightening speed, which will make you seem, at best, high.
The interviewers might ask, How did you learn to write humor?
And you might say, Once I realized that the essential quality of comedy is incongruity, both syntactic and dialogic, everything started to click.
They might be really interested in this content, saying Ah! and Oh! and I see! as you say it (which is what you hope for), and you feel great about this, but then you realize you are very likely boring everyone listening and should immediately cease attempting to make actual points. What they need from you is hilarity, punctuated by moments of non-hilarity, also known as poignancy. They need you to be insane.
What’s been the biggest challenge on your book tour? they ask next.
You have to be funny now and not intellectual, so you say, Probably the diarrhea.
You wish you hadn’t said it, you do, but you did, you said it, and now everybody’s associating your book with bowel movements, and you can’t change that.
* * *
Most times, the interviewers have not read your book and don’t know how to hide this fact, like an eager student in English class who lost his paperback of Moby Dick but feels compelled to offer his thoughts on whales, be they white or more traditionally blue.
The World’s Largest Man, a journalist might say on the phone.
Yes, you say.
About your father.
Yes.
So he must be very tall!
Silence. So much silence.
Maybe you say, It’s a metaphor.
Got it, she says. So how tall are you?
I’m taller than many people and shorter than many others, you might say.
You don’t know where to go with this. Is she really this misinformed about the occasionally metaphorical nature of book titles? Does she believe Moby Dick is about an actual penis named Moby? Does she believe Jaws is about facial reconstructive surgery?
Can we start the interview over? she maybe says.
Yes, you maybe reply.
You might also do the kind of interview where they haven
’t read your book and don’t seem to like you very much, which you assume is because your book is about vile primitive things like hillbillies and death.
So, what does your father think of the book? one of these reporters might say.
Now, how should I answer that? Because my father was dead, and the man’s death is a significant element of the story, its crowning moment of truth-telling. It’s like a minister had shown up to my father’s wake and asked, So how’s your dad? Is he here? Has he tried these sausage balls?
What can you possibly say?
Every night when I stood in front of a new audience, the book felt, in my ears, like a eulogy to the man who made me, and to the place that shaped us both. And here I was being interviewed by a probably well-meaning and likely underpaid journalist who didn’t seem to care much about any of it, whose job was to fill a few minutes between “Travel with Rick Steves” and a program on the resurgence of the pale-throated sloth. I tried to keep my sense of humor, but my father really was dead and I missed him and was tired, so tired, and lonely from traveling. That might be why I planned such an exhausting and exhaustive tour: I wanted to see my father again, every night, at every reading, in the stories we lived together.
“Does your father like the book?” one journalist asked. “Does he find it funny?”
“Yes,” I said. “It killed him.”
HOW TO SPEAK TO JOURNALISTS
Do Not Say*“Why are you so angry?”
*“Did you even read my book?”
*“I bet my sister could whip your ass.”
Do Say*“Great question!”
*“This has really been fun!”
*“I have a signed headshot of Ira Glass!”
All summer, every time the phone vibrated, a thrill juddered through my heart. What if it was The New Yorker? New York Post? Fresh Air? Los Angeles Times? It might even be The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. I began having dreams about doing a song bit with Jimmy Fallon, where Questlove and I played percussion on a series of deer skulls, and when I woke up, these dreams did not seem silly at all. Everything seemed perfectly possible, in this new reality. I was learning, in fits and starts, how to talk to the world about my success, especially journalists: Even when they seemed to not have read the book or even read a summary of the book, even when they asked what my deceased father thought about it, I tried to express gratitude, hospitality, curiosity, humor. I was surprised how difficult the interviews were.
I still wasn’t prime-time ready. But I was getting there, grasping, in pieces, how to create Driveway Moments, which is: Tell a story. Be vulnerable. Use your manners. Reach through the radio and grab a fistful of the world’s chest hair and tell them you love them, that you’re just like them, dammit, because you are. You’re not special. It’s not about you. You’re not the star of this show. The star of any interview should be truth, and the roughshod human stampede toward it. That’s why you tell a story. You’re trying to let others know how you did it, so they can, too.
Interviewing, it turned out, was also a lot like writing. It took work to make it look easy. I found myself listening to Fresh Air with a renewed and attentive vigor. Dang, some of those people were good. They made it sound like just talking, but they were not just talking. They were confessing. They were testifying.
I drove, and did my readings, and got better at everything, improving by degrees, but still, no calls from The New Yorker, none from Terry Gross. I prayed about it, trying with every interview to assassinate the jackass inside me and resurrect him into a vibrant anecdotalist.
And then, an email from Phillip. The subject line: Wow!
It was a major review by a major newspaper, known to readers the world over as the Oakville Beaver of Burlington, Ontario.
Hey, look! he wrote. You’re international.
Chapter 16
He wanted to better his condition until it was the best. He wanted to be THE young man of the future, like the ones in the insurance ads. He wanted, some day, to see a line of people waiting to shake his hand.
—FLANNERY O’CONNOR, Wise Blood
MY RELATIONSHIP TO THE WORLD WAS CHANGING. I NOW received electronic messages from strangers who knew more about me than I’d known about myself five years ago. Older women looked at me with sly grins, knowing the intimate secrets of my marriage bed, such as the code word for intimate relations that my wife and I use, in front of the children. These lecherous women said this word to me at the book-signing table.
“Ha, ha,” I said.
“Ha, ha,” they said.
Eek.
“What does your family think of this book?” audiences everywhere asked. The way they asked it, you could tell they were a little incredulous. Some seemed to believe that my family should have hoisted me up on a woodpile and set fire to it.
Had I spoken ill of the dead? I’d written things about my father, grandparents, an aunt, a second cousin, several great uncles, most of whom were now deceased, and I’m not sure I’d have said some of it so directly, so specifically, were some of those good people still alive. Was it necessary, for example, to refer to one of the dead people as a hussy, which was how the woman was described to me by several eyewitnesses? This particular character had been my father’s first wife. I didn’t know her. But then one day you find yourself doing a book event in a place where she might be buried, and you remember: Oh, wait, these are real people.
Of course they’re real, but they don’t seem real when you’re writing. They are in your imagination, these literary versions of real people, moving and behaving and misbehaving, and you’re trying to get it all down, the way you heard it.
Sometimes, when working on the book, I’d come up from the deep waters of composition and find myself shocked at what I’d written, about neighbors and loved ones, and I told myself it was fine, for I composed in a genuine belief that I was panning through mud for some shimmering nugget of truth that might live longer than any of us. So maybe I called someone a hussy in a story. It’s fine. I’d done it in the service of a higher truth, I think. I hoped.
* * *
In Memphis, at Booksellers at Laurelwood, a dozen relatives showed up to the reading, which pleased me greatly—cousins, first and second ones, distant, near, an aunt, some man who said we were related, and some other man who said he was kin to that man. They arrived all at once, the lot of them, as if they’d ridden up Highway 61 together via hayride. They travel in herds: These were my people, and I loved them very much. Some I hadn’t seen in a decade, others, at the last family funeral two or three years before. These were the characters of my youth, many of them, of Sunday dinners and Christmas Days. My plan was for my family to love the story and not, for example, to shoot me, or storm out, or raise their hands at the end and say:
How dare you, boy?
Or, You ought to know better.
Or, That’s not at all what happened.
This reading in Memphis was the first moment it hit me: This might happen. Somebody might stand up and contradict what I’d written, declare it was lies, all of it, or the best parts.
I feel very certain that every memoir is a performance around the dinner table, and the table is peopled with family and friends and strangers, and the strangers are there to gawk and learn and the friends are there for moral support and the family members are there to set the record straight, should anyone like to know what really happened.
This was my fear, and maybe I wanted it to happen. Maybe I wanted one of them to stand up and utter some odd fact that did not fit my narrative. Some of them took issue with how I’d portrayed the family, I had no doubt. When you tell stories around the dinner table, it’s as much a deposition as it is a tale. Everybody’s got a case to make. The best storytellers lay it out like evidence: Look, here’s what I saw. This is my testimony. Here’s the dookie that went down.
All these questions flared up in my heart as I stood there at a Memphis bookstore, in the city where I was born, to read a story about my family. These w
ere no longer mere tales of a boy from a faraway place; these were true stories about a true family, many of whom truly stood in back with arms folded, pending judgment. Perhaps I had made us sound a little too white trashy for their taste? Perhaps I had bespattered the family matriarch and patriarch in the telling? Were they going to hog-tie me and drag me off to some hollow and cleanse me of my unrighteousness?
One lobe of my brain said, You wrote with love, they know this.
The other lobe said, You discussed incest.
I suppressed this internal dialogue and finished to modestly thunderous applause, I felt, and then sat down to sign books. It had gone well. I skipped the incest. Nobody stormed out.
And then, a few moments after I sat down at the book-signing table, things got weird. You know how sometimes the quality of sound in a room changes, everything goes quiet, vanishes as abruptly as if someone had turned down the knob, and you worry that someone’s behind you with a claw hammer?
There I am, signing books, head down, trying to focus, when all the room’s noise ceased in one chilling instant. I looked up, pen in hand, my tiny inconsequential sword, and saw everybody looking at me.
“What?” I said.
The loose throng of family and friends and strangers fell back, and out of the crowd stepped a woman, who slid a copy of my book across the table.
As is my habit, I opened the book to sign it and engage this book buyer in a brief polite exchange, but when I opened the book I saw something that slammed the door on my heart: There, lying across the title page where you sign your name, was an old photograph, its colors washed out, amber, yellowing: My father, cutting a cake. A photo from his first wedding, when he was still a boy. I’d never seen this picture, had only heard the story of it whispered. The lady in the photo, the young bride, fifteen years old, was in my book. Until that moment, I had believed she was dead.
I looked up at the lady. The room held its breath. The people knew what I did not. I am certain those members of my family who were present must have recognized her. They may have invited her, for all I knew, to see what would happen.
Congratulations, Who Are You Again? Page 16