Q: Have you read Larry McMurtry’s Literary Life?
A: I saw it today at Books-A-Million. I was looking for the new book on Monk and saw it. I bought it this morning and read it this afternoon, at a sitting.
Q: Did you read the memoir before it, Books?
A: Yes.
And I am looking forward to reading the last memoir of the three,
Q: In AA they say. “Identify, don’t compare.”
A: That’s good advice.
I could identify with him as a reader, and as a writer.
I have read as much as he has and I have written as much as he has.
Where I have no basis for comparison is as an author, a published writer, a writer who had a career, in writing.
I am roughly the
same age as he is—he is three years older than I am—but our careers could not
have been more different.
I had no career, or an anticareer.
If I wrote a memoir you could call it Anti-Literary Life.
Anti- meaning not against, but instead of.
Q: Like an antihero is not a villain, but a hero with scant, or meager resources.
A: Right. A superhero almost.
And a superhero is someone who almost does not qualify as a hero because he had exceptional powers.
I mean, anyone can be a hero if he sees through women’s underpants.
Q: McMurtry acknowledges the role luck plays. He ends his book saying,
Never discount luck, in the making of a literary career, or any other career, for that matter. I would probably have been a writer of some sort no matter what, but I would not so easily have been able to make a good life for myself and my son were it not for the lucky fact that my novels attracted, and still attract, good moviemakers, who cause them to yield good movies that were financially successful as well.
A: It’s hard to attract good moviemakers if the books aren’t published.
The first hurdle is getting published.
I haven’t crossed that hurdle yet.
I am still at the starting gate, looking considerably older than the other horses in the pack.
I look like the grandfather, who collapsed, exhausted, at the end of The Secret of the Grain.
Life has passed me by.
Q: What’s your favorite McMurtry book?
A: Duane’s
Depressed, but I confuse it with Walter
Benjamin at the Dairy Queen and
At the end, Duane’s sheets stink, because he sweats at night, and doesn’t wash his linens.
It’s not good for an old man to let his sheets stink.