Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

by David Lipsky

  I moved to Syracuse in, um, April or May of ’92. And I’d say—no, I was at page 250, because the first 250 pages I just typed up, and had Bonnie send out to try to get money. Because I—the last money I had was gonna go for moving to Syracuse. And it was actually very exciting, I mean, it was the first time that I’ve ever really seriously been poor. And had to eat, for like a couple a’ months, waiting to see if Bonnie could sell it. Like eatin’ supper at—people bein’ real nice and sayin’, “We really like your company, you’ll have to come over for supper.” When the fact was they knew that I just … you know …

  And for some reason I just couldn’t take money from my parents. Because I was like twenty-seven or twenty-eight—no, I was thirty. And I … it was just, it was just, it would have been obscene.

  Was it exciting to—what sort of advance?

  Well, I mean I already told—no, I didn’t tell Adam Begley. Michael didn’t want me to tell anyone the advance. It was under six figures.

  But not so far under?

  Pretty far under. But the nice thing that they did, they didn’t give it to me all at once. They split it up, like gave me part the first year and part the second, which made it way easier. And, uh, tch tch tch tch.

  Halfway?

  (Spitting slurpy tobacco) It was more than that. So once again we’ve closed in on figures. Which was fine. But which wasn’t all that much when you’re splitting it year after year.

  But what I wondered emotionally was this: wasn’t it nice to learn that after you thought you’d cracked up as a writer, to know that you could get what is a healthy advance for literary fiction?

  [He turns off the tape again]

  As a matter of fact it wasn’t an exhilarating feeling. It was this real, um, like, I have this thing about takin’ money before it was done. I felt like it was sort of, it was jumping off the bridge. Because once I’d taken money for this thing, I knew I had to finish it.

  And, um, it was, I think after going into McLean’s in ’89, it was the bravest thing I’ve ever done. Because every cell in my body didn’t want me to do it. But I also was just—I knew I was going to finish the thing. I mean, the thing was alive for me by then. But there was just this whole, um—which probably makes you think I’ll take an advance for yet another thing. But the difference is now, it’s like I’ve got this teaching income. Where I don’t have to have it. [Loud crisp belch]

  Anyway. [He’s being totally up-front now, has dropped other stuff.] And then, you know, the bulk of it was written between …

  Oh, wow …

  [Drone nudged me down. I’m rolling on the ground laughing; both these big dogs are licking me, batting me over. I’m laughing on the carpet …]

  You’re gettin’ the full—You want to know what my life is like? That’s what my life is like.

  I’m laughing because now I’ve become the kid in my dad’s ad.

  Exactly. The thing about it, here’s the thing, Drone really loves to put the weight of his head on somebody. He really likes to rest his head on another person. Which I think is very moving in a weird way. He really likes you. He’s never taken to a male like he’s taken to you.

  [Flattering me again]

  I think just because I’m showing him attention.

  All right. Anyway, so I lived there. No, I got part of the advance right away. They gave me half up front and half on delivery, and they split the half into two years. And that’s what I lived on that year in Syracuse and then part of the next. I moved. I got the job offer from ISU in the spring of ’93, and for a variety of reasons decided—for one thing, I didn’t have health insurance. I was just sick of driving ten miles an hour around Syracuse, for fear I would get in an accident and my family would be wiped out. So I moved here—

  Perfect detail.

  I moved here—it’s actually biblically true—I moved here in the summer of ’93. And I remember, the book was about three-quarters done. ’Cause the reward for gettin’ three-quarters done … Which meant finishing, there’s a very long scene about a tennis match between Ortho and Hal, and Gately had been shot but wasn’t in the hospital. The book was three-quarters done, and the break from it was doin’ the State Fair piece. [For Harper’s] Which I did like two weeks after I’d moved here. And did that that fall, and then started teachin’ that fall, and finished the book. It was really funny because I’d have grad classes in this other house.

  Who was your local correspondent?

  Oh. Well, Native Companion was—yeah, Kimberly went with me to that. It’s not really her voice, it’s somebody else’s voice, if you can get my drift. But um, yeah, she was not pleased to have somebody else’s voice put in there. But all the stuff happened, like she really did get put in that thing called the Zipper. Nothin’, nothin’ in there is made up. That’s so weird, I’ve never done something—well, maybe the baton twirling wasn’t quite the carnage that … Although it seemed awfully dangerous at the time.

  This was the stuff about texture you never had in your stuff before …

  Well, I never would have said that it smelt good. I mean, I would’ve made fun of it somehow, you know? Like, “The smell of cowshit is everywhere. But shit was important, because shit was foul …”

  All right, so I did that. But the neat little detail about that was, um, I developed this thing, I think it started at Lotus. I just can’t stand fluorescent light. And as you saw up at ISU, it’s a fucking fluorescent light festival. It started at Lotus, but even when I was a little kid …

  Anyway, for some reason that year it was just crippling, and so I could only hold classes in the house. And the class would come over, and I worked in the living room, because I’d gotten Jeeves.

  Here?

  No—this was, I only bought this house last spring. This was actually a house that I rented through the mail before I moved here, up near Illinois-Wesleyan. It was very nice but it was real small, um. We would hold class and literally like, you know, people would have to move, you know, the Compendium of Drug Therapy and Psychiatric Nursing, you know, The Emergence of French Art Film over. And it was like, it was weird to be teaching.

  It was really like, I could tell I was getting near the end, because all the people were comin’ in, you know, and like sittin’ on the stuff. And there’d be all, there’d be jokes about, you know, Mount Manuscript.

  Could tell you were near the end why?

  ’Cause —it’s probably the same for you. It’s the end when like, when somebody else can … man, I gotta be clear about it. Because I knew, like I knew what was going to happen. I knew how it was gonna end. It didn’t matter if other people came in the room where all the stuff was. Because there wasn’t anything that could get shaken up. I wasn’t worried—well, I just wasn’t worried that having other people’s heads around would fuck with what it was I was doing … Whereas in Syracuse, I was really, except for one or two people, I really didn’t …

  [Dog rolls on back]

  … want anyone in?

  Well, nobody could come in, literally. I mean it was like, you know, I think my girlfriend and I maybe spent a total of two hours in my apartment, just ’cause it was impossible to be there for more than one person. But anyway, that was kind of neat. To teach, to have other people in there and to teach, in the same place where all that was going on.

  And then, uh, you know, I’d gotten Jeeves, and by the last part, I had a whole bunch of handwritten drafts, I had a whole bunch of typed drafts. And then when I finally sat down and typed the whole thing, I had Jeeves.

  And Jeeves had his own room in the next room. And the entire time would be spent with Jeeves up on his paws on this dog gate barkin’ at me. And I would either have headphones on, or I bought these earplugs, you know, those foam earplugs? And then finally a friend here gave me—because even that wouldn’t block it out—a friend gave me, you know, what airline workers use? Those earmuffs? That I would put on over the earplugs.

  It’s really weird to type when you can’t hear the sound of the
keyboard, that anchors you in some weird way. So it got very dreamy. And, uh, I was late. I was supposed to deliver on January 1, 1994. And I delivered June 18, 1994. And I remember being terrified that they were gonna sue me—so naïve!—for being late. And finally, I think Bonnie had to tell me that you know half the planet was always late and stuff.

  What else? So I delivered that summer and then I went to my sister’s wedding. And I didn’t, I remember, I didn’t hear from Michael for six months, and I was really mad, ’cause he said, “Deliver deliver deliver it.”

  And then I did hear from him. And he had, he’d written like a twenty-five-page letter.

  What’d it say?

  Well, he’s just talking about having read it, and the first half was making clear that he got it. And then talking about, um, talking about cuts, and talking about demands on the reader. Oh, no—here’s another funny detail.

  [Have the impression now he sort of wants to write article for me, he’s in the planning and sorting with me.]

  Is when I first typed it up and printed it out, and I knew it was way too long. I mean, he’d sort of had like a thousand-page top.

  When you first discussed it …

  He knew it was gonna be pretty long. But I mean I would talk to him every couple of months. And I was really kind of shining him on. I wasn’t tellin’ him how long it was, but I remember thinking I could fool him by—I printed it out in nine-point font, single-spaced. And I think it came to like, I don’t know, 1,070 pages; well, about the length of the book.

  But he called back, and this is the only time Michael’s ever really gotten mad at me. Because he said he’d tried to read the first fifty pages and it just hurt his eyes and what was I doing, and did I think that he wouldn’t notice how long it was if I printed it …

  So he made me—this is the only time that he’s ever like pulled, you know, authority shit on me—he made me go back and print the whole thing out double-spaced. In regular font.

  And I remember, those three days, being just terrified at how long it would end up being. Printing it out. That poor printer, I’ve had that printer for eight years. And it printed out, I would say, a total of like five thousand pages of various drafts of that book. But then I printed it out, and it was more like—it was almost seventeen hundred pages, you know, so things were really grim. And then he sent me this letter. And I knew, I knew several hundred pages needed to go. But every cut that I would make, like I’d cut about two hundred pages before I sent it to him. But, I remember, cutting the two hundred resulted then in writing an extra hundred and fifty—you know how it is. You cut one thing, it’s got implications in a hundred other places, and to patch that shit up …

  Anyway, and he wrote me this letter. And you know, it was a hard couple of months, and it’s hard to be clear about. I was worried for a while—he made a big mistake, he mentioned, “We really want to price this book at $30,” it set off all these flares in my head. “Oh no, these cuts are for commercial reasons. I’m a whore if I do this.” And that was right around Christmastime of ’94. And I remember, I think I told you about this, just happening to run into Richard Powers at this party, and him being immensely helpful. And givin’ it to Steve Moore to read, and Moore, Moore helped me with some structural stuff. Talkin’ to a couple of people about it, gettin’ letters.

  I actually, there’s a couple of kind of older, more established writers, that I’m sort of pen pals with. And I remember writing them, and asking them, and just getting real good advice. And I worked—that was also when I quit smoking. So it was December, January, February, of ’95, late ’94 early ’95, that I went back and about 350 pages got cut. And then sent that back. And that spring I was working on all kinds of different stuff, nonfiction, writing short stories.

  And then I got another letter from Michael in spring of—yeah, this past spring. Like May. Saying, “You know what? I just, I had the feeling there was more we could cut. I went back, I line-edited again.” He had another like two hundred pages of cuts. A lot of ’em being footnotes. And I didn’t take quite as many of those, I ended up taking about half. So another hundred pages got cut.

  So a lot of that year was like—it wasn’t really—I mean, I did the cruise piece, that was kind of a vacation. But a lot of that year it was really hard to get any kind of work done. Because it was like this thing that just kept following me.

  [Dogs chewing, clacking their bones]

  But I knew, I knew … like Michael was smart. And if I believed him, and I trusted him, I took what he said real seriously. And it was hard work knowing—Do I cut this? If I don’t—If I do, what do I do here?

  And I just remember, like, $400 phone bills. Calling Michael like all the time. And at home. Gettin’ to know his wife from talking to his wife when he was on the train going home. It was cool. I mean, it’s the only time, I’ve never thought I could work well with anybody else. The thing with Mark was a joke, I mean that was like, you know, I ended up retyping the whole thing. But this thing with Michael was, I really felt like, not only grateful to him, but like I was bein’ smart. Like there were certain things that were hard, that were unnecessarily hard. Or that were real cold, cerebral shit. And Michael being real smart about, “All right, maybe you don’t cut this scene, but you take five pages off this, and it’s 30 percent easier to read. And save yourself 10 percent reader alienation, which you need thirty pages later for this part.” You know what I mean? Like smart. Like smart.

  And that took through like May and June and July—no, May and June—more or less up to the present. I mean I worked on other shit over the summer, I went to tennis tournaments for Details, I went to the U.S. Open. Oh, I did a long thing on Dostoyevsky for the Village Voice, that took most of July. So there was busywork all summer.

  And then the copyediting came.

  That was a fucking, fucking nightmare. That came in August.

  Tell me: do you sometimes hate the copyeditors?

  This—let me tell ya, Little, Brown was really good. Because I had told Michael, I’d had bad experiences with them before, like copyediting it like a freshman essay. And I told him that if this happens, it’s gonna be a total mess.

  So they set me up with their head copyeditor. And gave me his number. And he and I would call back and forth about stuff. And they also—when it came time for the galleys, they hired another outside copyeditor. And gave me his number. And he and I edited the galleys like together and made sure that important shit cross-checked. Because there were enormous numbers of details to keep straight. But anyway, my understanding is that’s nonstandard. Not only hiring extra people but giving you access.

  I mean, they were incredibly, I’ve just never—and I know this sounds very like, “I want to thank the Academy.” But I’ve just never had, I really liked Gerry, but I’ve never had everybody from like the copyeditors to Michael to these PR people at Little, Brown who are just (a) really smart, and (b) they’re just really nice to me. You know? And did—I think when I made clear that the stuff I wanted to do, like talking to the copyeditor, would result in a better book—they just did it.

  There aren’t acknowledgments in the book because the list would be too long. And I had had a long list at the start of Broom and it looked very jejune to me. I wrote letters to—there were about ten people who were key on this. And said to them that there was just no way to do it, to thank them. And there were a lot of people around Boston, like in these halfway houses, that helped a lot who I just cannot, you know, thank.

  So that was pretty much it.

  The galleys were a fucking nightmare.

  And then you had your sister copyedit the final part, the proofs.

  She is—my mother is the best proofreader in the world, Amy’s second, and I’m third, as far as I’ve seen. And um, paid Amy a dollar a page, and it was worth it. She bought a car.

  Haven’t paid her the whole thing?

  She’s gonna proofread the hardcover, to get mistakes for the paperback. She’s gonna do that,
and I’m gonna pay her for it. Oh no, I paid her up front. You don’t stiff the proofreader.

  How long did it take Bonnie to read it? A lot of reading.

  I don’t know, and I have never wanted to ask her, because I know that she would be embarrassed or feel like she had to say it was quicker. It’s weird—Bonnie’s a really good agent. Her cup of tea is not my cup of tea. I don’t think, she doesn’t vibrate on my frequency. She sort of goes, “Oh, I don’t know what it is with David, just let him do what he does.”

  I send short stories to Bonnie—I trust her opinion on short stories.

  I sent this to Charis Conn, sent it to Jon Franzen, sent it to Mark Costello. But also, I sent it to them—I mean, Michael was the reader on this. He did something real smart: he got me to trust him, somehow.

  Publicity?

  [David fully in teammate mode, wanting to get this right, switches the tape player on and off now as memories occur to him.]

  There are a lot of things that if I’d been in charge I wouldn’t have done. I wouldn’t have done the postcard campaign. And I wouldn’t have had all white males on the back of the book. I wouldn’t have misspelled Vollmann’s name on the back of the book, that was kind of a boner.

  But you know how this process works. Is that, once you’ve turned it in you just, they’re gonna do what they’re gonna do. But um, and I remember feeling really weird, because like, I’ve got a rule, I don’t blurb friends. I don’t blurb much anyway, but I don’t blurb friends. And when Jon said that Michael had sent him a bound galley, I told him I thought that if he didn’t want to blurb it, I sure wasn’t going to hold it against him. And I wouldn’t’ve blurbed his book. And, so, that’s the only thing on the back of the book that makes me uncomfortable. Like, it could be perceived as log-rolling. I mean, it’s not.