About the Author (35 page)

And I’m writing again! I can’t exactly account for it, but ever since selling this manuscript, I’ve felt an ease—a positive joy—in banging out the words. I’ve started a novel and have even finished a short story. Maybe it’s the word processor I finally broke down and bought. What a marvel—the words simply
fly
onto the screen without a thought! (No wonder people write such big, fat books these days.) Or perhaps the eradication of my block goes deeper than that. Maybe it’s the sense that I’m no longer writing into a void. I have a public now, and as those monologues I used to deliver for Stewart show, I’m someone who needs an audience. How did he once put it? “It’s just so hard working in a vacuum.”

Speaking of Stewart, I’ve made peace with his ghost now. No longer am I startled when I spot a pile of copies of his novel in a shop window, his name emblazoned on the cover where mine used to be. Hell, I’m happy for him. It has all turned out for the best. I didn’t even mind, recently, when a young woman approached me in the west side Barnes and Noble and asked if I was the author of that book
Almost Like Suicide
.

“You’re that Stewart Church guy, aren’t you?” she said.

I couldn’t really blame her for the confusion, given the book’s complicated publishing history. And there seemed no point in straightening her out; it would have taken all day. So I figured there was no harm in it.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I am.”

Colapinto:
So tell me, Cal, what have you been up to since we least heard from you in
About the Author
?

Cal:
Actually, I’ve finally gotten around to reading your other book, the nonfiction one,
As Nature Made Him
. I’m about three-quarters of the way through. Not bad.

Colapinto:
Thanks.

Cal:
But I have to wonder. Did you see any overlap between that book and my story? I feel this strange kinship with David, the central character in
As Nature Made Him
. He’s a guy with a big secret about himself. He’s a male, forced to live as a female, so he feels like he’s living a lie. That has a parallel with me, right? I appropriate my dead roommate’s manuscript and pretend I’m the author. We both move through life harboring a secret, pretending to be someone we’re not.

Colapinto:
That never once occurred to me when I was writing the books. Instead, I saw a connection between you and the nominal “villain” of
As Nature Made Him
, Dr. John Money. He’s the psychologist who gets famous for publishing books and papers about the supposed success of a medical experiment which, behind the scenes, is failing spectacularly. I used to wonder if maybe Money sometimes felt a little like you, Cal.

Cal:
Huh. Now that you mention this, I see certain parallels. Dr. Money was nothing if not arrogant and grandiose. I notice that you saddled me with some similar traits.

Colapinto:
Well, I invented you long before I ever heard of Dr. Money. But learning about the quirks in his character was a nice confirmation of certain choices I had made in portraying you. Particularly at the beginning of the novel.

Cal:
Yeah—where I come off like an insufferable egomaniac. You have me describe my law student roommate as belonging to the “trudging armies of non artists, of
mere human beings
”—as if I considered myself some kind of god, simply because I had pretensions to being an author.

Colapinto:
You’re saying I was inaccurate?

Cal:
I was
twenty-five
.

Colapinto:
Precisely. And that’s why I think readers cut you some slack. And unlike Dr. Money, you end up confronting the error of your ways. You
change
. Besides, even at your worst, I balanced your insufferable qualities with some good ones. Or tried to. I didn’t want readers giving up on you on the first page.

Cal:
My “good qualities”? The only way you mitigate my high-handedness is by revealing that I’m really a complete screw-up.

Colapinto:
Well….

Cal:
I mean, at the top of page two you have me pontificating about my “almost monastic absorption in the pursuit of literature,” then immediately reveal that womanizing was “my chief occupation in the two and half years that I lived with Stewart,” and that “I hadn’t so much as uncapped a pen.”

Colapinto:
Look, we all deceive ourselves in life. The book is
about
self-deception, and the gradual attainment of some degree of self knowledge.

Cal:
Oh, la-de-da. Aren’t we getting a little grandiose
ourselves
, John? I thought the book was a thriller. A genre piece. A page-turner.

Colapinto:
Whoever said a page-turner couldn’t aspire to be a piece of literature?

Cal:
Whoever said so? Only every book reviewer and critic in the country—not to mention every marketing person and retailer. The bookstore stock boys need to know which shelf to put it on. What are they supposed to do with
About the Author
? It’s got all the thriller elements—crime, murder, deception, suspense—yet at the same time it’s a satire on the book biz, as well as being a laff-a-minute comic romp about the kooky scrapes and farcical mishaps of yours truly. That it also has some postmodern dipsy-doodling involving a novel-within-a-novel only complicates the issue further.

Colapinto:
You’re over complicating the book. Most people who read it simply take it as a thriller. What did Graham Greene call the books that he wrote primarily for fun? “Entertainments.”

Cal:
Well, I’m glad
you
found it entertaining. For me, it wasn’t such a holiday. Try looking down the barrel of Tommy’s revolver. Try having Les attack you with a knife, then subject you to blackmail. Try going on an extensive book tour to promote a novel you didn’t even write. It’s no picnic.

Colapinto:
Is it too late for me to say I’m sorry?

Cal:
Yes, it is. But look. Getting back to what you were doing with
Author
. How did it actually come about? Considering the hell you put me through in the book, I think I’m entitled to know how you dreamed the thing up.

Colapinto:
The original germ of the story was autobiographical. Your character was based on a version of myself. Like you, I was a would-be fiction writer, but I rarely, if ever, seemed to write anything—at least, nothing of any value. Certainly nothing publishable. And like you, I was sharing a bad apartment with a law student roommate, whom I eventually learned was a talented and prolific writer. Of course there were differences. In the novel, Stewart shows you his short story, “Harrington’s Farm.” In real life it was called “
Ballinger’s Farm
.”

Cal:
Wow. I thought that scene where I read Stewart’s story had a certain queasy air of reality to it. How do I put it in the book? “To this day I can recall vividly, sickeningly, the effect it had on me
:
a sensation felt primarily in the gut, as when the roller coaster passes the top of the hill and begins its stomach-lurching plunge down, down…”

Colapinto:
Yup. That was the feeling.

Cal:
So your roommate’s writing was pure genius, like Stewart’s?

Colapinto:
I hyped-up his talent for the novel. Artistic license. But he didn’t need to be a genius to trigger my envy. He needed only to write a clean and serviceable prose that told a coherent story with a beginning, middle, and end. Because, at the time, I couldn’t seem to write something like that myself.

Cal:
How come?

Colapinto:
I think it was my formal academic background. Studying all that Great Literature had made me horribly self-conscious. Everything I wrote was impacted, pretentious, stuffy. And I knew it. So I’d abandon things right after I started them.

Cal:
How’d you break the cycle?

Colapinto:
I had to wait until the effects of my education had worn off. By the time I was a couple of years out of college, I began to loosen up. I had started to work as a journalist, too, and that helped to beat some of the starch out of me.

Then one day in March of 1987, when I had a couple of days between journalistic deadlines, I decided to try to dream up a novel. Up until that time I had really only tried short stories, on the misguided notion that they were easier then novels. They’re much harder, of course. It’s like painting a porcelain miniature; you notice every infelicitous flick of the brush. But novels seemed like huge canvases that you just
throw
the paint at in order to fill up the empty space. It seemed a less neurotic proposition. The sheer, unimaginable scope of the project would be so forbidding that I couldn’t
afford
to grow self-conscious.

So on this particular day, I was wandering aimlessly around the Toronto Public Library (I was born and raised in Toronto), and I was trying to think up the subject for a novel. In the past, I would have come up with something oh-so-literary and serious and portentous. But on this particular day, I just said, “Screw it.
What about having some fun
? Why not write a page-turner, something loaded up with incident and plot twists, something that sets in motion a story that won’t let a reader go?”

Cal:
And weren’t you reading a lot of Patricia Highsmith novels at the time? No offense, but I catch a certain whiff of influence, not to say imitation, there.

Colapinto:
Well, yes, I was a Highsmith fan. I’d discovered her back in 1985 after seeing
The American Friend
, a movie by Wim Wenders. I noticed in the credits that the film was adapted from a book called
Ripley’s Game
by someone named Patricia Highsmith. This was long before the Matt Damon-Gwyneth Paltrow movie that recently put Highsmith’s name back in circulation. She gets “discovered” every decade or so, then sinks back into cult obscurity. Anyway, I learned that she was a wonderful writer, an acute observer of human nature and psychology, with an unsettling understanding of the invisible currents of malice, envy, and fear that underlie even the most benign-seeming of human interactions. Her first novel, written in her twenties, was
Strangers on a Train
, which Hitchcock adapted into the classic movie of the same name. But she also, of course, wrote a series of brilliant novels about a charismatic psychopath named Tom Ripley. I was amazed by these novels because they were genre thrillers, but somehow more. They shaded into actual literature. This inspired me. So for some time I’d been toying with the idea of writing about a conscienceless guy like Ripley. On that day in the Toronto library, I found myself gravitating to the place where Highsmith’s books were shelved. I sometimes like to fondle other people’s books as a way to get myself going. Anyway, there, along with her novels, I was surprised to find a book she’d written called
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
.

Cal:
Sounds kinda cheezy.

Colapinto:
Yeah, I know. But it was the single most inspiring book I’ve ever read about writing. Because you’re not two pages into it before you realize that Highsmith is talking not just about genre fiction. She’s talking about all fiction. And she says some stuff in there that dovetailed with everything I’d been secretly thinking about novels, but that I needed to hear expressed by someone I admired. “One thing is certain,” she says in her introduction, “readers…want to be entertained, gripped by a
story
. They want something unusual that they can remember, shiver at, laugh with, talk about, and recommend to their friends.” It’s amazing how easy it is for a young, beginning writer to lose sight of that.

Cal:
You’re telling me? Hell, you know all about the writer’s block I suffered as a younger guy. Every time I sat down at the page I thought I had to be Tolstoy. Except I forgot that Tolstoy was a hell of a yarn-spinner. I kept thinking novels were all about Big Ideas.

Colapinto:
Highsmith says that by hewing to the story, the Big Ideas will emerge on their own. It’s the creation of an involving story, with believable and interesting characters, that is the writer’s first responsibility—and pleasure. “The first person you should think of pleasing, in writing a book, is yourself,” she says in the first sentence. “If you can amuse yourself for the length of time it takes to write a book, the publishers and readers can and will come later.”

Cal:
Again, no offense, but that doesn’t exactly sound earth-shattering.

Colapinto:
But it was for me. I’d been thinking that books were written to satisfy the pontificatory appetites of bearded literature professors. Or critics. Or editors. Highsmith was telling me something radical. Amuse
yourself
. I repeat, with different emphasis
:
Amuse
yourself. I took that advice seriously—and a good thing, too, because it would take me more than ten years to write
About the Author
, which I was obliged to plug away at in short three or four day bursts every few months, between journalism deadlines. If I hadn’t come up with a story line and theme and characters who amused me, I would have quit after one day. As I had quit innumerable projects in the past.

Cal:
I’m sure glad you didn’t. I would’ve hated to join that scrap heap of fictional characters in your drawer—all those would-be Holden Caulfield clones who say “for Chrissake” all the time and rail against the “phonies,” and those ersatz Cheever heroes who illuminate the supposed horrors of middle-class life in the suburbs.
There’s
a fresh theme! Especially coming from someone who’s never lived in the suburbs. And thank God I don’t lie moldering with all those short-story protagonists you half-created when you were under the spell of Updike—all those adulterous husbands you wrote about when you weren’t even married.