Short but exciting post today: Rose Metal Press has accepted my book, It All Felt Impossible, for publication. You can read the full release here. Many more details, including release date, cover, pre-orders, etc. to come, but I’m very excited to work with such a great independent press.
It’s been an extremely long time since I’ve had a new essay to share here. My piece “Lawn Skeletons” was published in the October issue of The Sun. It’s about people in my neighborhood staging increasingly elaborate skeleton scenes on their lawns, but also it’s about a lot more than that. A lot of people seem to like this one. It begins like this:
In my New Jersey neighborhood it’s become kind of a thing for people to decorate their front lawns with skeletons year-round. On New Year’s they put little party hats on them, give them a champagne flute to hold. On Mardi Gras, beads draped around their necks, maybe a cigarette clamped in their jaws. Fourth of July, all kinds of red-white-and-blue regalia. During the long stretches between holidays, the skeletons rest. Most often in Adirondack chairs. Maybe it’s like this all over the country. I don’t know. I just know what I’ve seen around here. Though I have thought about putting skeletons on my own lawn, I’ve never done it. I think it would stress me out too much, trying to stay topical without doing the same bit as everyone else. Also, by the time I got around to considering it, lawn skeletons had become commonplace, and my contrarian defense mechanism kicked in: if other people were enjoying it, it probably wasn’t worth doing. A dumb way to think.
You can find the whole thing here. And check out this cool art they made for it.
Also, not that anyone is checking this page regularly, but stay tuned for a pretty big announcement within the week.
Four essays and three interviews I've completed recently, for those who don't obsessively follow all my tweets
1. For the Philadelphia Inquirer, I wrote about the challenges of offering support to students who have much bigger problems than teachers can actually solve.
2. For Buzzfeed, I wrote about the Philadelphia Eagles taking on Donald Trump, and how they've done a fine job of not playing into his hands by getting into a stupid cable news shouting war.
3. I contributed to Essay Daily's cool "What Happened on July 21?" project, in which writers try to document their days on 6/21/18. My piece got a little darker than I expected it to.
4. Lyz Lenz interviewed me at The Rumpus about How to Be Safe. We talked about writing from a female POV, Twitter's influence on the novel, and pre-apocalyptic books.
5. Bradley Babendir interviewed me about How to Be Safe for The Millions. We talked about research, finding a compelling voice, propaganda, lightning, and more.
6. The blog Advice to Writers asked me a few broader questions about what I'm reading, how I'm writing, and what advice I would give to younger writers.
7. For The Millions, I wrote a piece called "Who Will Buy Your Book?" which quite a few people seemed to like a lot, and which seemed to really annoy a bunch of others.
Today, I had the privilege of being invited back as a guest on WHYY's Radio Times, where Marty Moss-Coane talked to me about How to Be Safe, teaching, writing, mass shootings, toxic masculinity, locking your windows, and Godzilla. It was fun! Full audio is here if you want to check it out.
It's been a pretty good couple weeks of coverage for How to Be Safe. A quick news round-up here, for those of you not hanging on my every tweet:
1) In The New Yorker (!!!!), Katy Waldman writes, "the book’s alienated affect, flecked with sorrow and humor and rage, is so recognizable as one of the few rational responses to the status quo. In McAllister’s passion and exhaustion, in his struggle to communicate the incommunicable, one hears murmurs of Emma González’s speech at the protest on Saturday.”
2) O Magazine (blurry pics above and below provided as proof that I'm not making this up), Natalie Beach calls the novel "searing," and "haunting."
3) In Time, Sarah Begley writes, "Anna sees that something is rotten in these United States, and she refuses to gloss over it. . . . Anna is messy, intelligent, absurd, rude; you might even say distasteful. You could not call this a pleasant novel. But its brutal honesty befits the times.”
4) For Bookpage, Amy Scribner says HTBS is, "[a] prescient, achingly real novel," and, "Despite its searing subject matter, How to Be Safe is beautifully written. It’s also occasionally funny."
5) Bustle writes: "A gutting, shocking novel that circles a small-town tragedy, How to Be Safe is one of the most highly acclaimed novels of the year."
6) Entertainment Weekly included HTBS on a list of recent novels about gun violence
7) I did an interview with Midwestern Gothic about how to write about hot-button social issues, writing small towns, and writing in a female voice.
8) I have some events coming up soon in Green Bay, Pittsburgh, and Brooklyn (and also maybe DC and Baltimore). Maybe come to those events, please.
A roundup of links and news and so on below:
The title of this post really contains most of the essential information. But: The Young Widower's Handbook is now in paperback. I've never had a paperback release of a book before, so it's exciting to see the novel get another run. It got some really nice reviews last year, including:
ALSO: the paperback includes a bonus essay about the origins of the novel, and some discussion questions, for those of you in need of help with your various book-related discussions. Please consider ordering from your local independent bookstore. If that's not an option for you, it's available at Amazon and any other website that sells books.
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In related news: my forthcoming novel, How to Be Safe, got a starred review in Kirkus Reviews, which called it, "A brilliant, tragically timely second novel," and added, "This novel is an indictment of gun culture, hot-take journalism, and social media, and if that sounds like a miserable premise for a novel, fear not: McAllister is a brave and stylish writer, and Anna is a singular creation... Intensely smart. Sharply written."
You can pre-order this book right now. I'm also slowly adding some reading and other events to the calendar for April, and I hope to see some of you there.
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In completely unrelated news, the Eagles won the Super Bowl, and the entire city lost its mind, and I got to write about the game for Buzzfeed, in an article a lot of people loved, and a small handful of people really hated, which was fun.
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In further unrelated news, I joined Instagram, where I post pictures of such things as: my face, some trees, bad menu fonts, and Not Trash. If these things interest you, you can follow me @realpizzatom.
In a year when so many people lost so much faith in the fundamental institutions of our country (and I know a lot of people felt disenfranchised long before the past two years, and I know it’s a function primarily of good luck that I’d been able to live without that daily anxiety for most of my life), it seems pretty stupid to write a year in review post about the relatively minor events of my own life. But I feel compelled to do it anyway. Because the scope of the problems is so vast and still so unknowable that I don’t even have anything worthwhile to say about them. Because most days, the only thing you have is the personal. Because taking stock of yourself is at least one way to try to control some of the things you can control.
For the past five years, when people asked me and my wife what was new, we didn’t have much to say. We weren’t having children like so many of our friends. We were settled into the same jobs that we’d had for years. We already owned a home. Very little was changing. That was fine, even if it made for boring conversation. This year was different. A lot of things happened. Some of them were very good. Others were not very good at all.
1. I published my first novel: It didn’t end up in any of the year-end lists and it never quite broke through the marketing noise, but it’s selling much better than my memoir, and more importantly, my publisher facilitated a number of opportunities for me that exceeded any reasonable expectations I’d ever had for my writing life. I did live radio. I spoke at events in a dozen cities. I was featured (alongside Lauren Grodstein) at the Free Library of Philly. I got reviews and interviews in major publications. I flew to Vermont for the Misty Valley New Voices event, where the world’s friendliest people treated me to a dinner and a tour of their quaint town (I know quaint could be read as patronizing, but it’s the only appropriate word), and then taught me how to ski, then gave me a wine bottle with my face on it, then had me read to an enthusiastic crowd from the altar of an old church, and then they gave me dinner again, and then I had some bourbon sitting by the fire in the lodge and I felt like everything in the world was briefly okay. This all happened a week after the inauguration. When I landed in Rutland, my driver said he didn’t understand why people wouldn’t just give the president a chance. “I mean, he hasn’t even done anything bad yet,” he said. The next morning, the president signed the Muslim ban and when I came home, I was greeted at the airport by thousands of protesters. An inconvenienced passenger stood next to me in the terminal and said he wanted to beat the fuck out of all those protester pussies.
2. I spent a beautiful afternoon in Charlottesville, after speaking on two panels at the Virginia Festival of the Book. I had a salad and three beers and sat (almost) in the sun, and next to me, a woman who kept asking the bartender confusing questions finally apologized and said, “I’m sorry, I’m a poet.” All college towns feel a little bit fake, like movie sets built for young beautiful people, but I found it to be a very nice town overall. I didn’t know anything about the city’s history then. Five months later, Charlottesville would become home base for the white supremacist mobs the president loves. On the bus ride home, I would get a call from my wife telling me her father was dead. The rest of the year has been defined by his absence, and I don’t know what else I’m supposed to say about it. I’ve written so much about dead parents, I feel like I’ve used it all up.
3. Before my father-in-law died, when he was in the hospital recovering from a minor surgery that in no way suggested he would be dead soon, I told him I was close to selling my second novel, to a new publisher and a new editor (available in April!). It wasn’t official yet, but it was close. He clapped for me in his hospital bed. Seven years ago, when I published my memoir, he called me and asked, “How does it feel to have an actual dream come true?” And I had never thought about it in those terms before. I had dreamed of doing a thing when I was young, and then that thing had happened. It seemed impossible. I was trying to act very nonchalant about the whole thing, and he gave me permission to feel good about it. Anyway, he’s dead now. It’s hard to get past that.
4. My wife and I sold our first house, which we had bought at the height of the real estate bubble, using the life insurance money from her mother’s death as a down payment. We lived there for five years, and then moved because we were able to get a good rate on a house owned by an injured police officer who told us, as we were visiting the house for the first time, that he hated New Jersey and was desperate to leave. We spent the next five-and-a-half years renting the house because it was unsellable. Real estate is miserable, and I have thought so many awful things about the municipal workers in Barrington, New Jersey that I’m too ashamed to detail them here. Since 2012, we’ve completely wiped out our savings twice for the sake of that house. We’re lucky to have good enough jobs and few enough debts that we could survive it. To even entertain the concept of savings. I’ve been a homeowner for 11 years and the one thing I’m sure of is that I do not want to be a homeowner.
5. For the first time in my employed life, I worked on a two-year contract. I have to reapply for my job again in March, but for one year at least, I was certain that I would be employed in consecutive years. I think I’ll probably get another new contract, but also public education is being dismantled piece-by-piece and nobody wants to be an English major anymore. And I’m sorry, because this was supposed to be one of the positive items.
6. My dog died the night before my wife and I flew to Paris to celebrate our tenth anniversary. We’d owned her for three years. She was one of the dumbest animals who has ever lived, but she was very sweet and had had a hard life, and, though my wife cared for her deeply, the dog was more closely bonded to me. I spend a lot of time alone in the house and it’s nice to hear a dumb old dog snoring under the desk while you work. It’s nice to see her roll onto her side and slap her tail against the carpet just one time, summoning you for a belly rub. It’s nice to have some external motivation to go for a daily walk. With the dog, I felt more like an actual part of my neighborhood than I ever have in my adult life. I spoke to neighbors. I let their children pet the dog. I saw the subtle changes in people’s homes. The dog died because we chose to make her die. She had stopped eating and drinking most days, and for the last two months, she rarely left our bedroom. We were certain she would die while we were on vacation, and at least this way felt like we were doing something sort of humane. Having a dog is often a burden, and it’s expensive, and they make the house filthy. I’ve promised my wife we will wait a while to get a dog, and still I check Petfinder once a week just to see who’s available and who needs a home. Two nights ago, in the rain, I carved a hole in a Rubbermaid container and then into a Styrofoam cooler, which I placed inside the Rubbermaid, so I could construct a makeshift shelter for a feral cat we’ve named Oreo. We put food out overnight and it disappears, but I have no idea whether we’re feeding a cat or a family of rodents. It feels good to be taking care of something, even without the reciprocation of a dog’s heavy, dumb head dropping into my lap when she’s lonely.
7. What am I supposed to say here about Paris, besides that going to this city had been one of my wife’s goals since she was old enough to know Paris existed? We ate so much food. We drank a lot of wine (I spent a lot of this year experimenting with drinking more, and found that it works pretty much any day of the week). I struggled with the language. The toilet in our AirBnB stopped working on day 2. The Eiffel Tower was one of the seediest, most unpleasant landmarks I’ve ever seen. Crowds at massive tourist attractions behave monstrously. While we were there, the American president called self-identified Nazis “very fine people.” I had to email my mom every day to let her know I had not been killed by a terrorist. Everywhere we looked, there were police and military patrolling with massive guns. The crepes were great. We rode the Metro all over the city. We felt free and in love and for days at a time we could forget about all the other nonsense. You can be in a place where terrible things are happening all around you and still feel good about being alive if you’re with the right person. Platters of cheese help.
8. I wrote a short essay about guns that has almost certainly been read more than any other thing I will ever write. I wrote it in an hour, and it's one of the only complete pieces I've written since mid-summer. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to say about that either.
9. I taught an advanced fiction course and then the fiction capstone course, retaining many of the same students, and it was the best teaching experience of my life. Most days, I felt actual joy walking through the door to the classroom, looking forward to hearing what strange, funny, insightful things my students would say. I learned a lot about anime and also about swords. I was floored by their ambition and commitment to writing, which is so much greater than mine was at their age (I wanted people to think of me as a writer, but I had very little interest in writing; I barely even read anything then). We talked about whether fiction and art even matter in a world like this, and they continually reaffirmed my sagging faith.
10. I read a lot of books. Some of the books I liked a lot: Sweetland, The Red Car, Ghost Story, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Closely Watched Trains, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Mrs. Bridge, Girl at War, Dirty Diamonds #8, Massive Cleansing Fire. Some writers keep incredibly detailed records of their annual reading, and though I think it would be nice to be one of those people, I am not one of those people. It’s possible I’m a bad reader. You can find more about these books by searching for them on the internet.
What makes something a good year? I have no idea. A year is an accumulation of days in which you hope more good things happen than bad things, and then you make some promises to yourself to try to make the next one better. It all keeps happening no matter what you say or do.
Two out of five stars to 2017, a mostly shitty year in which some good things happened for me.
It looks like this.
That's also my thumb.
The back looks like this:
It comes out in April, but you can pre-order it right now at just about any online outlet.
This morning, as I tried to process the news about the shooting in Las Vegas, I wrote a very short essay called "What To Do With My Body In the Event I Die in a Mass Shooting." I had intended to maybe not share it at all, or just post it on this site, but the good people at The Rumpus liked it and published it this afternoon.
You can read it here. It starts like this:
“Take that body and don’t even clean the blood off the skin, don’t wash it out of my clothes. Don’t change my facial expression or adjust my posture. Don’t do anything to hide the reality of my death. Let people see me exactly how I was in my last moments, my face twisted in horror and confusion, my body curled unnaturally as if hunching my back could ever protect me from the bullets (nothing can protect you). I want them to see my mouth agape, my eyes feeling betrayed but also weary, because in those final moments, I know I would be shocked but not surprised (you can’t be surprised by something that happens every day; nobody is surprised to see the sun rise in the morning).”
This is a short, but pretty important, update: I have a new book coming in April 2018. I love the cover (though I never would have guessed I'd be a guy with two books with roses on the cover), and I love the publisher, and I feel extremely grateful to be publishing books at all, let alone to be working with such talented, energetic people. When I showed the manuscript to my agent, she said she loved it, but then warned me that we might not find anyone who's willing to publish it; it's a dark book, and it's a little weird, and so I feel even more fortunate that Liveright is willing to take a chance on this one.
I'll wait to share all the details, but for now I can say: this is the closest I've ever come to writing the kind of book I've always wanted to write. I tried so many times, but was always too young, or too afraid to take chances, or something. So I am extraordinarily excited to have this book on the way.
More details soon! Until then, you can pre-order from Amazon and add it to your list on Goodreads (or tell your local indie bookstore you'd like them to order it).
And, hey, if you've read and enjoyed The Young Widower's Handbook, please consider leaving a review at one of those places. User reviews matter more than you might think, and they really help other people find the book.
Another quick post just to note that I had two new essays published last week.
First, this piece at The Review Review, in which I offer advice to writers on how to conduct themselves at readings when promoting their books. Here's a sample:
“A lot of these tips, I admit, come down to issues of personality. Your job is to just try to act normal for a couple hours. This is difficult for some people; if you’re an asshole, you can’t fix it, but you can at least try to hide it for a while. Some days, selling even a single book seems impossible. You need to do everything you can to improve the odds.”
Next, Miracle Monocle, the literary magazine from the University of Louisville, released their latest issue, which includes my travel essay, "The Least Authentic of All Experiences." It's a little longer than the travel essays I wrote on this site last summer, and it's about Italy, romance, authenticity, vanity, and a lot of other stuff. A sample of this one:
“ On this trip, we will see so many priceless artifacts that I will get tired of seeing them. Before this vacation, a friend described seeing the Pietà as one of the most moving experiences of his life, witnessing such a profound testament of love and beauty. I look at it for a long time and agree it is well-made, and then I look longer, wondering why I haven’t been moved in the same away. I take a picture and walk to the next sculpture. When we get to the Sistine Chapel, the woman in front of me falls to her knees in tears, and my first thought is: okay, we get it. You’re moved. And my second thought is a deep well of regret for being so cynical I would assume this emotional reaction is contrived. I want very much to be the sort of person who sees amazing art and falls to his knees in wonder, but this doesn’t seem like something you will yourself toward.”
A quick roundup of news related to my novel, my life, and my other writing-related activities:
1. NJ.com reviewed The Young Widower's Handbook and said a lot of nice things about it: "Though terminal ennui could become tiresome, McAllister adroitly deals with a major issue: How does one partner keep going after the other dies?"
2. The Seattle Times included TYWH in a roundup of 4 noteworthy debut novels, and also said some very nice things about it.
3. The Washington Independent Review of Books said, "Be warned, this is among the most heartbreaking first chapters in contemporary literature," and also they seemed to like the other chapters a lot too.
4. Shaun Bossio interviewed me for Redivider about my book, my writing routine, and the failure of English departments to articulate their value.
5. At the end of the month, Mike Ingram and I will be among the many authors featured at the new UntitledTown Book and Author Festival in Green Bay. This will likely involve a like episode of Book Fight, in addition to some other events. Due to time and budget constraints, this looks like the only stop I'll be making in the midwest for now, so if you're near the area, I hope you'll consider coming out.
6. I wrote a short essay about the inner lives of sports mascots for The Classical, and had a lot of fun with it. It starts like this:
“The sports mascot ecosystem is a strange and unsettling place. The animals within it act in ways that are both familiar and wholly unexpected. Even if we put aside pressing questions about the suspension of traditional predator-prey relationships during games, and focus on their biographies, we still know so little about the interior lives of these creatures.”
7. As it turns out, I may not be able to make it to DC for the Barrelhouse Conversations & Connections conference, though if you live in the area you should go, because there are so many great people there, and featured authors Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, Sarah Sweeney, Geeta Kothari, and Tara Campbell are worth the price of admission alone.
1. Fred, my father-in-law, died last weekend. His son walked into his apartment and found him dead on the floor. The cause of death is unknown, though there's no real mystery; he'd been obese for decades. His health was in decline. Last time I saw him, he was in the hospital after having his toe amputated due to complications from diabetes. But he was supposed to still be alive. Until that afternoon, his death was still theoretical.
2. I was on a bus in rural Virginia when my wife called to tell me the news. I didn't believe her, so she said it again, and a minute later, the call was dropped. I couldn't get Wi-Fi and the signal was so weak I couldn't text anyone. I tried to respond to her in all the possible ways, but I was in one of those strange few places where you're still incapable of contacting people. I wanted to tell her I was coming as fast as I could, but this wasn't technically true, and anyway, what did it matter? My instinct was to rush home and somehow save the day, but what could I do besides arrive at Fred's apartment and confirm that, yes, he was dead, and, yes, we were all sad? This was a useful reminder of my helplessness in the face of real problems; the world does whatever it's going to do, and you have no say in it. Your father-in-law dies sometime on Friday night and lies there on his apartment floor until the next day, and there's nothing you can do about it. You just ride the bus and when you get home, you hug your wife and tell her how sorry you are.
3. My first impulse was to write something about Fred. It's one of the only skills I have. As I sat on the bus taking notes on my phone, I quickly lost faith in the value of writing as a survival skill. And yet, a week later, here I am.
4. My own father died 14 years ago. His was a prolonged illness that gave us time to say our goodbyes and get affairs in order, to warn people, to try to gird ourselves against the injury of his loss. I remember so little about the days following his death, except that I delivered the eulogy, and that I was very angry at everything, and at night I would get so drunk it scared me and when I woke up I hated myself. Later, I wrote a book about it, and even later, I wrote another book driven by the fear of my wife's eventual death. Since then, I've written a book about a school shooting. If it seems sometimes like the only thing I write about is death, it's because that's the only thing, besides food, that I think about every day.
5. About Fred: he worked at La Salle, where I met my wife, and, though he was an enormous man, the size of an NFL offensive lineman, he was the least intimidating person I'd ever met. A different, worse, kind of man would have overstepped his boundaries trying to protect his daughter, using his access to every building on campus to check on us, asking his friends to spy on us. Instead, he would call her a half hour before stopping by her dorm room, then call again to ask if it was okay for him to come in. When he arrived, he would be carrying family sized bags of M&Ms and Wint-O-Green Life Savers. He would drive us to Wendy's and buy us lunch. From the moment he met me, he accepted me, and he trusted me to treat his daughter well. Later, when it became clear I would be around for a while, he began introducing me to strangers as one of his kids. When I had no father, he was there to fill that void. Some people never even get one father, and I was lucky enough to have had two.
6. This is where I'm supposed to share some anecdotes, to distill his existence into a few brief stories. One story will be funny and another will be heartfelt and poignant. Maybe the third will be a small moment that's somehow revealing of Fred's deeper character. Show, don't tell. Scene vs. summary. All that shit. I'm sorry, but I can't do that right now. You're just going to have to believe me when I say he was a very kind man who made the people around him better.
7. He had just moved to a new apartment, and the only time I'd been there, I was helping him unpack. Even though he'd moved several times in the past few years, and he'd shed a lot of his belongings, he still had so much stuff. He was a deeply sentimental man and had a hard time parting with his possessions. There was the flimsy plastic centerpiece we'd bought for his 60th birthday, three years ago. The carpet he'd been saving for 25 years, just in case he ever needed it, because it once belonged to his grandmother. The panoramic poster of the Milky Way he'd been carrying in his car trunk for at least 8 years, just in case he had time to get it framed. Christmas decorations of every conceivable size and shape. A series of file folders of incredible specificity, including Cable TV Remote Instructions, Tom-Fred Halloween, How to Read a Palm, and Snow History - Past Bad Winters. Two weeks after we unpacked his things, I was back in his house repacking everything, boxing some items to donate and bagging others for trash. The remainder is stacked in my basement so later my wife and her siblings can sort through it and determine which of of these things will constitute their inheritance. When I was twelve years old, I had to help clear out my grandmother's three-story house; she and her children had accumulated so much junk during the decades they'd lived there that it took us nearly three full days to empty everything. That weekend was, and still is, the hardest work I've done in my life. Since then, I've been afraid of leaving a mountain of junk behind me, have hated clutter and viewed it as a sort of prison, have tried annually to walk through my house and throw out anything I don't need because I don't want to subject someone else to sorting through all my odds and ends after I'm dead, trying to determine why I kept this newspaper clipping or that magnet. And yet, I felt impossibly sad when I pulled Fred's winter hat out of his car. I placed it on top of the Keepers pile for reasons I can't explain, except that it seemed too intimate a belonging to throw away, not when there are still loose hairs in there, not when it still seems like he might show up again with a cold head. I thought then: maybe clinging to every object is the only way to live. Maybe our junk is the thing that defines us. Maybe the only way to really know someone is to dig through their knick-knacks and garbage and see the things they valued beyond all reason.
8. The truth is, it doesn't feel like he's dead. I just haven't seen him for a couple weeks, which isn't unusual. That's all death is: it's not seeing someone again, for a very long time. Eventually, you see everyone for a last time, and you rarely know when it's coming. This is my final text to him: I think we've done 400 at 8-10. Tails on. It was about shrimp. Most of the time, your last words to someone are as meaningless as a guess at a shrimp recipe.
9. In the aftermath of the death, the procedural details are easy. You call the people you have to call. You arrange pictures artfully on a piece of poster board. You go through the motions of being alive because there's nothing else you can do. You tell everyone you're doing your best.
10. Okay, here's one story: when my memoir was published in 2010, I tried many unsuccessful marketing strategies, including setting up a sales table at a bar in Bethlehem, PA, where the Philadelphia Eagles hold their training camp. The book had an Eagles angle, and I hoped to intercept hundreds of Eagles fans between practices, sell out of fifty books in a couple hours, have a nice lunch, and head home. Fred drove with me, ninety minutes from his apartment, and sat there with me for five hours. We went home with forty-nine books, and that one sale was only because Fred had finally convinced the restaurant manager to buy one. One man asked me why anybody would ever write a book. Another spent a half hour telling me I was too young to have written a memoir, and he was the one who should have written a book. Several people asked me where to locate the restroom. Not only did Fred never complain about wasting a whole day to make one pity sale, but later he would talk about that day fondly, as if it had been a great success. The next year, he asked if I wanted to go again.
11. Fred's final years were a struggle, a litany of bad breaks and health problems, and every time he called, I worried he was going to tell me about some new catastrophe. We complained about him too often, about the ways he'd become a burden and the poor decisions he'd made-- eating badly, skipping his physical therapy, not applying for a new job, everything. We worried he would end up having to move in with us as he gradually lost his legs and his ability to work. We talked about the renovations we'd have to make to accommodate him. We dreaded having to become his full-time caretakers. As you get older, you spend more and more time complaining about your parents, their foibles and bad habits, even though you know their time is limited. You love them, but they also know how to annoy you in a way that nobody else can. The complaining is a kind of fear, that before long you'll adopt those same bad habits that annoy you so much. That eventually, you will decline and become demanding and frustrating, held hostage by your own character flaws. That you will wear out your welcome. Later, we felt guilty for all the complaining, for being so wrapped up in ourselves that we didn't realize how little time he had left. But that's an essential part of it too: the regret, the failures.
12. I got that phone call last weekend, and I wanted to rush home and I wanted to do something. I knew I couldn't save him, and I knew I could only do so much to help my wife, but what I wanted to do more than anything was to be there in the moment and to see him, to bear witness to his life. To say, yes, this man lived, and he was good. It wasn't always the life he wanted but it was a life still, and it mattered, no matter how you parse all the details.
13. One of the happiest times of Fred's life was when he worked for the Girl Scouts. He told me often that the number one rule at camp was to always leave a site in better condition than it was in when you'd found it. We don't get to determine how people remember us, but if he could, I think he would want everyone to know that nobody ever worked harder at following that rule.
It's been a full week of book-related action, including a fun but exhausting trip down to Washington, DC for the AWP conference, where I met a lot of cool, supportive people who were very excited about reading the novel. Full details/links below:
1) Research Notes at Necessary Fiction - In which I discuss my (probably not great) research habits as a writer, and specifically what I had to research to write The Young Widower's Handbook
2) Salon Author Questionnaire - A group Q & A with authors Cara Hoffman, Sara Flannery Murphy, Jason Rekulak and Amanda Eyre Ward. Some fun questions in this one, including, "How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything?"
3) Huffington Post interview - Brandi Megan Granett asks a few questions about point-of-view, writing masculinity, and more
4) Radio Times interview - I linked this in my last post, but, I don't know, here it is again. A 50-minute interview about writing, teaching, grief, and a lot more. The very bad picture at the top of this post is of the control room at WHYY.
5) Largehearted Boy playlist - for the great Largehearted Boy site, I compiled a playlist of songs to accompany this book, and talked a bit a bout how music influences my own work.
6) Review at The Big Smoke - A really nice review by Joseph Edwin Haeger. A sample: “What is appealing about The Young Widower’s Handbook isn’t that it’s funny and entertaining, but that it is both of those things while being honest about grief. Even though it’s a sad book (I mean, what do you expect from the title?), it’s a book full of truths that speak to the full human experience, from happiness to sadness and everything in between.”
7) ADDED 2/14: I wrote a piece for the "If My Book" series on Monkeybicycle, in which I compare the novel to a variety of sights and sounds you'd encounter on a road trip.
I have events coming up on 2/15 (3:30 at Temple U's Paley Library, and 7 PM at the Cherry Hill Barnes & Noble) and 2/23 at the Tirefire Reading Series in Philly.
1. Last week, the literary journal JMWW published my short essay, "See You in a While." It's about drinking beer on my deck with my dog and trying to appreciate good things. It'll take you less than 5 minutes to read.
2. Today, the lit website The Millions published a piece I wrote about how podcasts can build communities and change the way we discuss books. As I say in the essay, "Literary podcasts are like being part of a book club without the social pressure or the bad wine." I say more stuff besides that too. Read it here.
3. Booklist reviewed my book and said, "McAllister’s debut novel is at turns funny and touching, particularly in the vignettes sandwiched between the narrative, which delve into Hunter’s thoughts and feelings about his marriage and his wife. Expect comparisons to Jonathan Tropper and Nick Hornby." So that's a good thing.
4. I've been adding lots of events over the past week. Starting 1/21, I'll be making the rounds, with a bunch of stuff in Philly and South Jersey, but also events in VT, GA, Boston, DC, and hopefully some more places soon. See the full listing here, and check back for future updates.
A couple weeks ago, I drove down to Baltimore for the NAIBA 2016 conference, to meet booksellers and other authors, and, after a very long production process, it felt like I was finally beginning the next (fun) stage of the book process.
And now, in the past week or so, we've gotten two bits of really good news.
1. The first review, from Kirkus, calls The Young Widower's Handbook, "A quirky, well-told fiction debut." Read the rest.
2. Barnes & Noble included the novel on their Discover Great New Writers list for Spring 2017. I've been trying to play it cool and act like this isn't very exciting, but it actually is, and I am very grateful to have the whole team at Algonquin (and The Book Group) supporting this thing.
This barely qualifies as an update, but in October 2014, I wrote an essay called "Halloween Glossary, D-H" for Waccamaw, and I've always been pretty happy with how it turned out. In my ongoing quest to make this essay an October staple on par with the Great Pumpkin and Bobby "Boris" Pickett's entire oeuvre, I thought I'd share it again today.
It includes one of my favorite dumb jokes I've ever made, and it starts like this:
DEATH
Halloween is a celebration of death, of dead things and things that kill—vampires and werewolves and zombies—but also a time of literal death, first the leaves and the grass and the millions of mosquitoes and the creatures that feed on the mosquitoes, then the end of the hopes one always pins to summer, the plans to get organized, to spend a romantic weekend in Cape Cod, to finally finish that novel manuscript, to get that scuba diving certification, to go on a safari and watch a lioness as she stalks an antelope. Also the time of year when my dog died, when I took two elderly Welsh Corgis to the local groomer in preparation for a pumpkin carving party and then returned from the groomer with two elderly Welsh Corgis, but Otis, the tri-color, the one with the little patches of brown fur like eyebrows, which invited us to attribute all sorts of human characteristics—empathy and understanding and high-level cognitive skills—was quietly suffering from a ruptured spleen. I didn’t know the spleen was ruptured then, and I ignored his abnormal behavior when he wobbled across the room wheezing and flumped in front of me with the force of a sandbag dropped from the ceiling; I patted him on the head and then left to drink beer with my friends in the city. While I was out, my wife returned home from work and called to tell me Otis wasn’t standing and could barely breathe. My wife—a nurse, normally calm and rational and never panicked (see also: PANIC ROOM PROCEDURES)—was sobbing and I knew that the dog was dying, had been dying in front of me, that his flumping was a cry for help, that the other dog was at home watching him die and was incapable of understanding why she would never see Otis again, and so, four beers deep, I drove to meet them at the animal hospital, speeding at ninety, ninety-five, checking my phone at the same time for directions, and knowing I was endangering others’ lives, hoping only to arrive in time to see the dog one last time and to be with my wife who had grown up with this dog and who had made many unbreakable associations between the dog and her own long-deceased mother, and I remember thinking: I hope if I get pulled over, the cop is a dog-lover. I remember thinking: I hope he understands.
My story, "Eight Scenes from the Life of a Professional Raven" is up at Hobart today. It's the third in a series of stories I've been writing about sports mascots who are actually oversized sentient animals, rather than guys in suits. The first two are about a pig and a gorilla, respectively. Today's story starts like this:
The sky every morning tells its own story, and today when I wake before sunrise, I look up and see it is going to be a bad day. It’s hard to explain, but there’s a sense you get. You live long enough and you can read the clouds, and you can hear distant flocks migrating, and you can see the weather before anyone else.
There’s going to be a storm, and it is going to rip through this city like god’s own scythe during harvest.
UPDATE:
The story was named Longform's fiction pick of the week. This is the second time a story of mine was has been singled out by Longform.