I mention this because of my tendency to think that the last disturbing memoir that I've read is the MOST disturbing of all - all that preceded it, all that will follow it.
Sooner - perhaps immediately - or later, I can see that I was wrong. Whenever I have the possibly perverse desire to be wrong, I only have to use a superlative. Since he has other interests besides listening to my stories, I tell them to you. I live in a tiny town in Virginia in a great old farmhouse on a wide and serene river with my dog, whose name is Preacher. I think, when we read, we relish and devour remarkable voices, but these are, in the end, stories we remember. I wrote an early novel, and then my parents disinherited me, so I moved to New York, which is where small-town people move to do and say the things they can't do or say at home, and I ended up working in advertising, a profession that feeds on young people who have an amorphous talent and no particular focus.įired in my early fifties, the way people are in advertising, I tried to figure out what to do with the rest of my life, and I came back around to the pastime that had filled the days and nights of my childhood: telling complex anecdotes about the living and the dead. I went to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and then lived in Europe for several years, thinking that I would be an actor or a painter, two things for which I had a passion that outran my talent. For southerners, the past is as real as the present it is not even past, as Faulkner said. It's a mystery and there is no answer.I was born in a small university town in Virginia, a town in which, besides teaching, the chief preoccupations were drinking bourbon and telling complex anecdotes, stories about people who lived down the road, stories about ancestors who had died a hundred years before. How life goes in bad directions when your heart is asleep.
How one woman can take Gatorade to every one of her son's lacrosse games and another can lie in bed all day weeping, popping generic drugs, watching Oprah as though waiting for the Second Coming, and piling her dirty dishes in the laundry room. How one young man can be handsome and strong and marry and heiress and work at Debevoise and Plimpton and retire to Nantucket to await the visits of his grandchildren, how they can be sailing in the bay while another young man, exactly like the first, can end up in a glass room in Lexington, Kentucky, on Haldol and Thorazine, without hope, without a girlfriend, without a future, and how easily the one can become the other. How a person can go through a whole life and never once contemplate suicide, like people who have never once wanted to be a movie star. How they bear the weight of everyday life without screaming. How they can stand to sit in front of a TV from eight until Leno every night.
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