Blue Rider Press 2016 Sampler

becoming grandma
by lesley stahl
but what if were wrong?
by chuck klosterman
she poured out
her heart
by jean thompson
siracusa
by delia ephron
were still right,
theyre still wrong
by james carville
substitute
by nicholson baker
2016
blue rider press
ebook sampler
inspiring, singular
entertainments
and enlightenments
for curious,
dedicated readers
little nothing
by marisa silver
good vibrations
by mike love
pretty paper
by willie nelson
pour me, a life
by a. a. gill
rules for others
to live by
by richard greenberg
forever words
by johnny cash
Becoming
Grandma
The Joys and Science of the
New Grandparenting
LESLEY STAHL
BLUE RIDER PRESS

NEW YORK
9780399168154_Becoming_TX_pi-xiv_1-274.indd vii
2/11/16 10:40 AM
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
Copyright 2016 by Lesley Stahl

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Photo credits
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2/11/16 10:40 AM
Over the River and

Through the Woods
ecoming a grandmother turns the page. Line by line you are

rewritten. You are tilted off your old center, spun onto new
turf. Theres a faint scent of dj vu from when you raised your

own children, but this place feels freer. Here you rediscover fun
and laughing, and reach a depth of pure loving you have never felt
before.
Becoming a gran exhilarated me with a new purpose. The
change was so big and granular and unexpected, I wanted to understand it. So I took out my reporters notepad and a tape recorder and set off on a journey, a quest, to find out what was
happening to me. Does it happen this way to all grandmothers?
People have said to me, Are you nuts? Writing a book about
being a grandmother? Telling everyone youre that old? It made
me feel I was going to out myself, break some kind of taboo, like
Betty Ford admitting she had breast cancer.
The implication is that admitting youre an LOL is self-
9780399168154_Becoming_TX_pi-xiv_1-274.indd 1
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Lesley Stahl
destructive. Did you know that LOL has two meanings? Laugh
out loud is one; little old lady is the other, known in the plural
as lollies. Which is funny because Lolly is what my grandchildren call me.
But most of the grandmothers I met on my exploration said
they felt strong, physically and mentally. Though one did comment, I think I may be on my next-to-last dog!
Does being an LOL mean you bake chocolate-chip cookies
and are otherwise doddering? Or does it mean you went to college and possibly graduate school, got a job, stayed in the workforce and are now a BOTa bright old thingwith power and
influence? More and more, its the latter. As weve had the Age of
Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and the Age of Aquarius,
there are signs that at the turn of the twenty-first century were
entering the Age of the Grandmother.
One reason is that there are so many of us. Baby boomer
women alone (aged fifty to seventy) are forty million strong, and
the vast majority are grandmothers. It wont be long before more
diapers are sold for oldies than for babies!
Youll notice that throughout the book I refer to myself as a
baby boomer. Well, Ive taken a literary liberty, because technically Im a pre-boomer, born in 1941. But I see myself as a member of the BB tribe: I was influenced by the same music, politics,
and turbulence of the 1960s.
We older women, with our strength in numbers and our MAs,
MBAs, and PhDs, are moving into positions of authority and visibility, flexing muscles no one knew we had. Women over sixty
are CEOs and heads of state. And in our government, look at
2/11/16 10:40 AM
Becoming Grandma
whos at the pinnacle: Janet Yellen (sixty-nine), chairwoman of

the Fed; former Speaker of the House and now Minority Leader
Nancy Pelosi (seventy-five); Senator Elizabeth Warren (sixty-six).
It appears that getting up there is the road to breaking the glass
ceiling.
Were beginning to see the influence in our culture as well.
Hanna Rosin wrote in The Atlantic, Youth is no longer coolor
at least its hold on cool has weakened. As evidence, the beauty
and fashion industries are turning to sixty-plus-somethings to
represent their lines. Cline, for example, chose eighty-year-old
Joan Didion as the face of its 2015 collection, while Marc Jacobs
chose Jessica Lange at sixty-four. LOral signed the sixties icon
Twiggy, now sixty-six, to sell its new cosmetics.
When I started on television in the 1970s, I was told that as
awoman, I would not survive on the air past the age of forty. I
guess the thinking was that the sagging would sag the ratings. As
time went by, forty became fifty, then sixty. Hey, fellas, Im still
herein my seventies! Aint it the darnedest.
Research shows that people of both sexes feel more comfortable with ambitious older women than with ambitious younger
ones. I gained some insight into why when I met the headmistress of a private school in New York. She told me that she used
to take much more grief from the fathers than themothers. The
dads were always thrusting their wagging fingers at me, she said,
raising their voices, flapping their arms, taking me on.
But when she reached her sixties, it stopped. I thought I had
finally learned how to take charge of a meeting, she said, that I
had gained the kind of respect from the fathers I had always felt
2/11/16 10:40 AM
Lesley Stahl
was lacking. But then she realized something else was at play. I
had lost my sex appeal, she laughed ruefully. I came to see that
its primordial. That once a woman can no longer reproduce, all
that sexual tension, the boy-girl thing, goes away. The contest is
over, so men are more willing to take us at face value. She said it
was disconcerting to realize she was no longer appealing in that
way, but then again, her job got so much easier.
This willingness to more readily accept an older woman in a
position of leadership must be a factor in the rise of Hillary Clinton, the poster girl of the Age of the Grandmother. Theres also
this: that a gran carries an intrinsic moral authority and by definition conveys a sense of warmth. No wonder Hillary tweets and
talks about her granddaughter, Charlotte, out on the hustings.
Speaking of herself and Bill, Hillary has said, We just go to
stare at her. It is wonderful and silly at the same time. Practically
every grandparent in the country who heard that thought, Hear,
hear! The experience of having a grandchild is a common bond,
a fundamental human experience that people share.
This new world of powerful older grandmothers is populated
by the same women who were the revolutionaries of the late
1960s and early 70s. They (and I) invaded and changed the
workplace, as the first wave to benefit from the womens rights
movement. Now thirty to forty years later, theyre in the vanguard
of a new revolution, pioneers again, defining and developing a
new way of grandmothering.
As I explored the subject, I looked into the biochemistry of
grandmothers, the history, and the economics. Because my own
experience was based on just two grandchildren, both of whom
are still very young, I went on a gran tour, asking my friends, my
4
2/11/16 10:40 AM
Becoming Grandma
colleagues, experts and Google to help me understand the emotions, duties and problems inherent in the new American grandmothering.
One thing I found out early is that most grans are besotted.
Just when you think your days of falling madly in love are long
past, you look down at that baby and find yourself in a rapture,
going limp. Having grandchildren is why they say old people are
happier than young people. And why, as my father-in-law used to
say, this is a pretty ol world.
2/11/16 10:40 AM
U.S.A. $26.00
Canada $35.00
We live in a culture
of casual certitude.
This has always been the case, no matter how often that certainty has failed. Though no generation believes theres nothing
left to learn, every generation unconsciously assumes that what
has already been defined and accepted is (probably) pretty close
to how reality will be viewed in perpetuity. And then, of course,
time passes. Ideas shift. Opinions invert. What once seemed
reasonable eventually becomes absurd, replaced by modern
perspectives that feel even more irrefutable and secure
until, of course, they dont.
But What If Were Wrong? visualizes the contemporary world
as it will appear to those wholl perceive it as the distant past.
Chuck Klosterman asks questions that are profound in their
simplicity: How certain are we about our understanding of gravity? How certain are we about our understanding of time? What
Chuck
Klosterman
will be the defining memory of rock music, five hundred years

from today? How seriously should we view the content of our
dreams? How seriously should we view the content of television? Are all sports destined for extinction? Is it possible that
the greatest artist of our era is currently unknown (orweirder
stillwidely known, but entirely disrespected)? Is it possible that
we overrate democracy? And perhaps most disturbing, is it
possible that weve reached the end of knowledge?
Kinetically slingshotting through a broad spectrum of objective and subjective problems, But What If Were Wrong? is
built on interviews with a variety of creative thinkersGeorge
Saunders, David Byrne, Jonathan Lethem, Kathryn Schulz, Neil
deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene, Junot Daz, Amanda Petrusich,
Ryan Adams, Nick Bostrom, Dan Carlin, and Richard Linklater,
among othersinterwoven with the type of high-wire humor and
nontraditional analysis only Klosterman would dare to attempt.
Its a seemingly impossible achievement: a book about the
things we cannot know, explained as if we did. Its about how
1606
we live now, once now has become then.
But What If
Were Wrong?
But What If
Were
Wrong?
Chuck
Klosterman
4/6/16 12:04 PM
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ChuckKlostermanOfficial
CKlosterman
An imprint of Penguin Random House
Visit us at blueriderpress.com
Jacket design by Office of Paul Sahre
is the bestselling author of seven nonfiction books (including Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa
Puffs and I Wear the Black Hat ) and two novels (Downtown Owl and The Visible Man).
He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Esquire, Spin, The
Guardian, The Believer, Billboard, The A.V. Club, and ESPN. Klosterman served as
the Ethicist for The New York Times Magazine for three years, appeared as himself in
the LCD Soundsystem documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits, and was an original
founder of the website Grantland with Bill Simmons. Klosterman is a native of North
Dakota and currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Entertainment Weekly TV critic
Melissa Maerz.
Photograph of the author by Kris Drake
Thinking
About
the Present
As If
It Were
the Past
Chuck Klosterman
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Copyright 2016 by Chuck Klosterman

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse
voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for
buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright
laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any
form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing
Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
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is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC
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ISBN 9780399184123
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book design by n icole l a roch e
7/25/16 3:40 PM
01
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A Brief Examination as to
Why This Book Is Hopeless
(and a Briefer Examination
as to Why It Might Not Be)
05
06
07
08
09
10
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13
The library in my sixth-grade classroom contained many books
14
that no one ever touched. It did, however, include one book that
15
myentire class touched compulsively: The Book of Lists. Published
16
in 1977, The Book of Lists was exactly what it purported to be521
17
pages of lists, presented by The Peoples Almanac and compiled by
18
three writers (David Wallechinsky, his sister Amy, and their father
19
Irving). This was a book you didnt really read, per se; you just
20
thumbed through it at random and tried to memorize information
21
that was both deliberately salacious and generally unencumbered
22
by the f act-checking process (I still recall the books list of famous
23
homosexuals, which included only three rock musiciansJanis
24
Joplin, Elton John, and David Bowie, the last of whom was married
25
to the same woman for more than twenty years). Sequels to the
26
book were released in 1980 and 1983. What I did not realize, how-
27
ever, was that the creators of The Book of Lists also published a sim-
S28
ilar work titled The Book of Predictions, in 1980. (I stumbled across
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[13]
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But What If Were Wrong?
01
it in the late nineties, in the living room of a friend who liked to
02
buy bizarre outofprint books to peruse while stoned.) Like its
03
more famous predecessor, The Book of Predictions describes itself: Its
04
several hundred pages of futurists and scientists (andsomewhat
05
distractinglypsychics) making unsystematic predictions about
06
life on Earth in the coming fifty years.

On those rare occasions when The Book of Predictions is refer-
07
08
enced today, the angle is inevitably mocking: The most eye-
09
catching predictions are always the idiotic ones. As it turns out,
10
there has not been a murder in outer space committed by a jealous
11
astronaut, which is what lawyer F. Lee Bailey predicted would
12
occur in 1990 (and evidently struck Bailey as more plausible than
13
the possibility of defending a jealous Hall of Fame running back
14
for an earthbound murder in 1994). According to population
15
expert Dr. Paul Ehrlich, we should currently be experiencing a
16
dystopian dreamscape where survivors envy the dead, which
17
seems true only when I look at Twitter. Yet some of the books
18
predictions are the opposite of terrible: Several speculators accu-
19
rately estimated the world population in 2010 would be around
20
seven billion. A handful of technology experts made remarkably
21
realistic projections about an imminent international computer
22
network. Charlie Gillett, a British musicologist best known for
23
writing the first comprehensive history of rock music (1970s The
24
Sound of the City), somehow managed to outline the fall of the
25
music industry in detail without any possible knowledge of MP3s
26
or file sharing.1 Considering how difficult it is to predict what will
27
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The days of buying records are already numbered, Gillett begins. The
current process is inefficient, cumbersome and expensive, with musicians transferring their noises onto tape, somebody else transferring the tape to disc, and the
[14]
7/25/16 3:40 PM
A Brief Examination as to Why This Book Is Hopeless
still be true a year from now, any level of accuracy on a f ifty-year
01
guess feels like a win.
02
Yet what is most instructive about The Book of Predictions is not
03
the things that proved true. Its the bad calculations that must
04
erhaps even conservativea t the

have seemed totally j ustifiablep
05
time of publication. And the quality all these reasonable failures
06
share is an inability to accept that the status quo is temporary. The
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Book of Predictions was released in 1980, so this mostly means a
08
failure to imagine a world where the United States and the Soviet
09
Union were not on the cusp of war. Virtually every thought about
10
the future of global politics focuses on either (a) an impending
11
nuclear collision between the two nations, or (b) a terrifying alli-
12
ance between the USSR and China. As far as I can tell, no one in
13
the entire Book of Predictions assumed the friction between the US
14
and Russia could be resolved without the detonation of nuclear
15
weapons. A similar problem is witnessed whenever anyone from
16
1980 attempts to consider the future of interpersonal communica-
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tion: Even though widespread cell phone use was right around the
18
cornerthere was already a mobile phone network in Japan in
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79it was almost impossible to think this would ever replace tra-
20
ditional landlines for average people. All speculation regarding
21
human interaction is limited by the assumption that landline tele-
22
phones would always be the best way to communicate. On page 29,
23
there are even escalating predictions about the annual number of
24
long-distance calls that would be made in the US, a problem thats
25
irrelevant in the age of free calling. Yet as recently as twenty years
26
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whole complicated mess of distributing and selling records, shipping unwanted

returns back to the warehouse...
[15]
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But What If Were Wrong?
01
ago, this question still mattered; as a college student in the early
02
nineties, I knew of several long-term romantic relationships that
03
were severed simply because the involved parties attended differ-
04
ent schools and could not afford to make long-distance calls, even
05
once a week. In 1994, the idea of a sixty-minute phone call from
06
Michigan to Texas costing less than mailing a physical letter the
07
same distance was still unimaginable. Which is why no one imag-
08
ined it in 1980, either.
09
This brand of retrospective insight presents a rather obvious
10
problem: My argument requires a successful futurist to antici-
11
pate whatever it is that cant possibly be anticipated. Its akin to
12
demanding someone be spontaneous on command. But theres
13
still a practical lesson here, or at least a practical thought: Even if
14
we cant foresee the unforeseeable, its possible to project a future
15
reality where the most logical conclusions have no relationship to
16
what actually happens. It feels awkward to think like this, because
17
such thinking accepts irrationality. Of course, irrational trajecto-
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ries happen all the time. Heres an excerpt from a 1948 issue of
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Science Digest: Landing and moving around the moon offers so
20
many serious problems for human beings that it may take science
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another 200 years to lick them. That prediction was off by only
22
179 years. But the reason Science Digest was so wrong was not tech-
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nological; it was motivational. In 1948, traveling to the moon was
24
a scientific aspiration; the desire for a lunar landing was analogous
25
to the desire to climb a previously unscaled mountain. Science
26
Digest assumed this goal would be pursued in the traditional man-
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ner of scientific i nquirya grinding process of formulating theo-
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ries and testing hypotheses. But when the Soviets launched the
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Sputnik satellite in 1957, the meaning of the enterprise changed.

[16]
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A Brief Examination as to Why This Book Is Hopeless
Terrified Americans suddenly imagined Khrushchev launching
01
weapons from the lunar surface. The national desire to reach the
02
moon first was now a military concern (with a sociocultural sub-
03
text over which country was intellectually and morally superior).
04
That accelerated the process dramatically. By the summer of 69,
05
we were planting flags and collecting moon rocks and generating
06
an entirely new class of conspiracy theorists. So its not that the
07
1948 editors of Science Digest were illogical; its that logic doesnt
08
work particularly well when applied to the future.
09
Any time you talk to police (or lawyers, or journalists) about any
10
kind of inherently unsolvable mystery, you will inevitably find
11
yourself confronted with the concept of Occams Razor: the phil-
12
osophical argument that the best hypothesis is the one involving
13
the lowest number of assumptions. If (for example) youre debat-
14
ingthe assassination of John F. Kennedy, Occams Razor supports
15
the idea of Lee Harvey Oswald acting a lone its the simplest,
16
cleanest conclusion, involving the least number of unverifiable
17
connections. With Occams Razor is how a serious person consid-
18
ers the past. Unfortunately, it simply doesnt work for the fu
19
ture. When youre gazing into the haze of a distant tomorrow,
20
everything is an assumption. Granted, some of those competing
21
assumptions seem (or maybe feel) more reasonable than others.
22
But we live in astarkly unreasonable world. The history of ideas is
23
littered with more failures than successes. Retroactively, we all
24
concede this. So in order to move forward, were forced to use a
25
very different mind-set. For lack of a better term, well just have
26
to call it Klostermans Razor: the philosophical belief that the best
27
hypothesis is the one that reflexively accepts its potential wrong-
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ness to begin with.
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[17]
7/25/16 3:40 PM
THE HUMANITY PROJECT

[A] bracing narrative stance and a tart political viewpoint. . . .
[Thompson] is eerily good at inhabiting a wide range of perspectives and
has a fine ear for the way young people speak to one another. . . A
novel that doesnt pretend to have any answers, comfortable or otherwise,
but that vividly, insistently poses questions we should be asking.
S U Z A N N E B E R N E , The
J E A N T H O M P S O N is the author
of six novels, among them The Humanity Project and TheYear We Left Home, and six story collections, including Who DoYou Love (a National
Book Award finalist) and, most recently, The
Witch. She lives in Urbana, Illinois.
New York Times
The Humanity Project, the prolific Jean Thompsons sixth novel,

weaves a rich, moving story of parents and children,
money and poverty, virtue and evil. . . . Thompson manages
this complicated choreography masterfully.
K A T E T U T T L E , The
Boston Globe
PRAISE FOR
THE YEAR WE LEFT HOME
J O N A T H A N D E E , The
NewYork Times Book Review
TheYear We Left Home plumbs the American heart with

rigor and intensity, seamlessly connecting one familys fortunes
to those of the larger national community.
L I Z A N E L S O N , O: The
Jacket design by Elise Rigollet and Jason Booher

Photograph of the author by Marion Ettinger

Oprah Magazine
She
Poured
Out
Her
Heart
A NOVEL
NAT I O NA L B O O K
AWA R D F I N A L I S T
Jean
Thompson
AU T H O R O F T H E Y E A R W E L E F T H O M E
the complicated friendship

of two very different women who meet in
college, She Poured Out Her Heart is a novel of
remarkable psychological suspense, crafted by
National Book Award finalist Jean Thompson.
The night that Jane and Bonnie meet on
a college campus sets them on paths forever
entwined. Bonnie, the wild and experimental
one, always up for anything, has spent the past
two decades bouncing between ill-fated relationships, while Janes seemingly perfect life,
perfect husband, and perfect children have
all but materialized out of a fantasy. But these
appearances contradict the quiet, inescapable
doubt Jane feels about her life. One night, in the
middle of her own Christmas party, she steps
outside into the snow, removes her clothing and
shoes, and lies down in the backyard. When she is discovered,
nothing is the same for
anyone. As Jane begins
to have visions and
retreat into a private
inner world, Bonnie
finds herself drawn
inevitably into an affair with Janes husband.
Thompsons mastery of
complex emotion begets a novel of
desire and the nature of lovewho
we love, how were loved, and, most
important, that we reach urgently and
always for a higher love, regardless of our circumstances. She Poured Out Her Heart is a finely
wrought, haunting story of female friendship
and deception, and the distance in between.
T R AC I NG
1605
PHX #1355721 03/01/16 CYAN MAG YELO BLK 300.BLUE 072.BLUE
An extraordinarily warm-hearted novel.
Jean
She Poured Out
Thompson
Her Heart
PRAISE FOR
U. S . A . $ 2 7. 0 0
Canada $ 3 6 . 00
she
poured
out her
heart
d
JEAN THOMPSON
B LU E RIDER PRESS
New York
9780399573811_OutHerHeart_FM_p1-10.indd vii
3/15/16 4:02 PM

375 Hudson Street
Copyright 2016 by Jean Thompson

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages
diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you
for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright
form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing
ISBN 978-0-399-57381-1
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
BOOK DESIGN BY AMANDA DEW EY
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either

are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously,
and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses,
companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
9780399573811_OutHerHeart_FM_p1-10.indd viii
3/15/16 4:02 PM
ordinar y
omebody should tell her hes not worth it.

It took Jane a beat or two before she could say, Who? Tell who?
She had been lost in looking at the apples, her vision gone greedy at the
wealth of them. They were piled and heaped in bins, all the different
kinds: Jonagold, Red Delicious, Braeburn, Fuji, Pink Lady, Honeycrisp,
Winesap, McIntosh, Rome. The names promised an extravagance of
tastes. Granny Smiths were bright chartreuse, Auroras were yellow, and
the rest were all shades and textures of red. Deep and polished, or striped
and freckled with green and gold, or blush-stained. Row on row on row,
all the apples in the world. She was thinking of nothing, nothing at all.
Her eyes had taken her out of herself. And when Bonnie said what she
did, it took an effort to pull herself back to normal conversation.
Who? Jane said. Tell who?
Over there. Dont look.
Directed, then forbidden, Jane managed a sideways glance: A young
couple, eighteen? Nineteen? The boy worked here, he wore the usual blue
shirt and cap and he was standing next to a cart of produce boxes that
needed unloading. The girl was thin, tense, wearing glasses, neither
pretty nor unpretty. Jane saw what had drawn Bonnies attention, since
the two of them were having an argument.
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3/15/16 4:03 PM
JEAN THOMPSON
You couldnt hear them, but it was plain enough from the girls beseeching face and the boys impatience and bluster. Something along the
line of, Where were you last night? And, I had things to do. And, Well,
are you coming over tonight? And, I dont know. Maybe. Maybe not.
Depends.
At least that was what Jane imagined them saying. Bonnie gave her an
elbow nudge and Jane dropped her gaze. After another minute or two
the girl gave up and left, walking fast through the whooshing automatic
doors. Even from behind she managed to look entirely miserable. The
boy called out to one of the other boys working, again something Jane
couldnt quite hear, something along the lines of, You believe that? Yeah,
well she needs to quit doing whatever shit it was she didthe boy getting
louder as he walked away from them, swinging his arms to show the extent of his exasperation and belligerence. He had an unremarkable,
coarse face, and his voice had a braying tone to it, and Bonnie was probably right, he wasnt worth it.
Why are women such idiots? Bonnie said, throwing a plastic tub of
lettuce in the cart. I want to kidnap her and deprogram her.
You could probably catch up to her in the parking lot.
Shell have to figure it out for herself. A few more years of degradation and self-abasement.
That sounds nice, Jane said.
Shut up, please. Im being wittily bitter. Witterly bitterly.
Mhm. Somewhere, she had a grocery list. It wouldnt be much help,
since shed gotten into the lazy habit of writing fruits and vegetables,
instead of anything particular. The kids would probably eat apples if she
sliced them up. She chose three of the ordinary red ones, McIntosh. Separated out and sealed in a plastic bag, there wasnt any magic left to them.
Bonnie trailed along behind her, giving baleful, disinterested looks at
the celery and cabbage. It was all right to ignore her when she got herself
all worked up like this, and in fact Jane knew she was meant to provide
a certain going-about-her-business calm, while Bonnie had herself a little
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3/15/16 4:03 PM
SHE POURED OUT HER HEART
tantrum over her latest crash-and-burn love affair. Jane had already been
through the escalating phone calls, detailing the events leading up to the
final rupture, and had invited Bonnie over for coffee and a round of
agreeing with all the terrible things Bonnie had to say about Patrick,
whom Jane had never met. The tantrum could not be taken entirely seriously, just as Patrick could not be taken entirely seriously. When Jane
said she had to get going on her errands, Bonnie surprised her by asking
if she could come too. I dont want to be home so he can find me if he
comes looking for me. Which he wont. So I dont want to be there waiting for him to not come over. You know?
Jane knew. It was hard not to. Bonnie always told her such things.
Theyd known each other since freshman year of college, and there was
still that quality of late night dorm room oversharing, at least on Bonnies part, because Janes life had gotten so married with kids, nothing
steamy going on there. This, at least, was who they had agreed to be for
the last ten years or so, even though by now there was an air of performance to it all. Bonnie was pushing past the age when she might have
been expected to settle down. Instead there were still guys like Patrick,
who was such an amazing brute in bed, but had some issues, in the past
but still the recent past, with substance abuse. You were meant to be
loyal, you were meant to be supportive, but honestly.
Loyalty? Even now?
You could run out of patience with playing your part, especially when
it was assumed you wanted to hear all the lurid, depressing details because your own life was, you know, dreary and conventional, while Bonnie was a grande amoureuse. I mean, please. Patrick had even borrowed
money from her, though Bonnie wouldnt say how much, since that
seemed to be more embarrassing than the sex stuff.
Bonnie said, Is this the kind of occasion when its appropriate to
send dead flowers? I could do that. Hed get the message.
I hope you didnt let him take any naked pictures. You know, revenge
porn stuff.
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3/15/16 4:03 PM
JEAN THOMPSON
No, Bonnie said, but not right away, meaning she had to think about
it. For a moment her face lost its indignant, focused quality and wavered.
Then she regrouped. Not unless he had some hidden camera system,
and I dont think hes bright enough.
Instead of asking why it had seemed a good idea to invest (in all
senses of the word) in a man who was either too dumb or too untrustworthy, or both, for purposes of basic peace of mind, Jane said, I forgot
olives, would you go back and get a jar of olives? Kalamata. Pitted.
Bonnie said sure and sauntered off, and Jane watched her go, thinking that Bonnie should probably cut back on her drinking, it was making
her gain weight. Or maybe Jane should wish that on her.
Jane steered her cart out of the main traffic path and rummaged her
purse until she found the grocery list. If she didnt arrive home with the
right brand name products, her spoiled rotten children would whine. So
that there must be Fudge Stripe cookies and Goldfish crackers and macaroni made with fluorescent orange cheese, and so on. Of course, calling
them spoiled was a cover for her own pleasure in buying such items for
them and satisfying their passionate, trivial desires. It was a Mom thing.
She wondered if Bonnie would ever have kids. She talked about it
from time to time. She hoped to God that Bonnie was using birth control.
And if she wanted kids, she could find a sperm donor, or latch on to the
next incarnation of Patrick and get herself a baby that way. Both of them
were collapsing into their nervous late thirties now. Biology closing in.
They were stale dated. All those calcifying, unreliable inner parts. Babies
didnt just come along when you wanted them to, lots of things went
wrong. Nobodys fault. Menopause would come down like the lid of a box
for both of them, and there would be one less impossible worry.
Stop thinking thinking thinking.
People ended up doing pretty much what they wanted to, didnt they?
In spite of anything they said. Watch their feet, not their mouth. Bonnie
liked her life of high drama and dingy heartbreaks, it gratified something in her and she didnt want to change. Bonnie considered a lot of
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3/15/16 4:03 PM
men boring, meaning they werent alcoholic or unavailable or in between jobs. She didnt intend to settle for an ordinary, draggy life, like
Janes.
But it wasnt fair for Bonnie to want everything.
Jane consulted the grocery list one more time. She had procured
fruit and now had to work on vegetable. Something she might be able
to sneak into a plain lettuce salad, shredded carrots, maybe. The kids ate
frozen corn and frozen broccoli with glop sauce. That was all she had to
show for her efforts. Fine. Let them eat cake. Hadnt she set herself on a
track for what shed wanted, hadnt it all come to pass? She had. It had.
Difficult to remember these days, when she was at the service of her family from eyes open to eyes closed, that she had willed it all into being. Her
son was eight, her daughter six. Her husband was a husband. What else
could you expect? You couldnt pick and choose your problems. They
were ordinary too, no matter how exquisitely they pained you.
You had to make your peace with ordinary, since it was most people
most of the time. Nothing more ordinary than this oversized temple of
food, its well-engineered lighting and whispering air and all the buy-me
colors, and her grocery list, now getting grubby around the edges. The
apple aisle was right behind her but she was done with spacing out in
front of produce displays. She selected the shredded carrots, and some
red and green peppers that she might be able to hide in tacos, and then
she backtracked to the liquor section and picked up a bottle of the Frangelico that she liked and her husband didnt. Then it depressed her that
she was attempting the consumer cure for whatever ailed her, not to
mention the expense, not to mention, hello, alcohol, and she put the
bottle back.
All right, enough, Jane told herself, her corrective for useless, fanciful
thoughts, summoning up this droll self-awareness, see how amusing I am
being, speaking to myself as if I were my own misbehaving child. But the charm
was not working. I will not be able to go on. I will not be able to do and say all
the things that are expected of me, minute by minute by day by day, with no end to
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3/15/16 4:03 PM
JEAN THOMPSON
it. I will fall down and not get up again. I will open my mouth and black croaking
noises will come out.
As if the force of these thoughts had literally pulled her head around,
she found herself staring up at the ceiling of the store, which she could
not remember ever looking at with any particular attention, and now she
was surprised to find it so large and vaulted, equipped with all sorts of
trusses and grids and catwalks and spotlights and rigging, like some vast,
mechanical sky.
Bonnie couldnt tell which kind of olives Jane meant, since there were
a couple of different brands, and she herself didnt spend a lot of time
thinking about olives. She took both bottles back with her so Jane could
suit herself. And make a particular kind of face at the inferior olives, as if,
how could anyone imagine her taking such a deficient product home? The
Jane standards were unforgiving and mysterious, and Bonnie had given
up trying to fathom them. Jane cut out recipes from magazines and went
through phases when she tried to get her family to eat mashed root vegetables or grains popular at the time of the Pharaohs, which usually ended
with the kids pitching a fit and getting cereal for dinner instead.
Bonnie had to admit, she herself wasnt much of a cook. Her refrigerator was usually full of hinged styrofoam boxes, the remnants of different meals out. Once in a while she roasted a chicken with lemon and
rosemary, her one foolproof recipe. Patrick was such a shit. And she was
so screwed.
Shed had her reasons for Patrick, the usual ones, having to do with
lonesomeness and boredom and good old sex. And some less usual ones,
like not wanting to give the impression of being so stupidly available, just
hanging around and waiting for the next time.
Not that there was going to be a next time, except you never really
knew that, did you. In spite of all the promises and good intentions. You
set yourself up for the endless possibilities of next time.
Surely he knew about Patrick by now. Let him wonder what she was
3/15/16 4:03 PM
up to. If he ever did such a thing as wonder about her. She was such a
total fucked-up mess.
You did not want to believe that you were a terrible person, and on
the one hand you could list your virtues: kind to animals and those in
need, good sense of humordid that count?positive energy, hard
worker, etc. etc. But the other hand was a big smashing fist.
Bonnie shook her head loose from her crummy whiny downer fest
and looked around to see if anybody was watching her, as if her forehead
was a billboard advertising stupidity and shame. But no one was paying
any attention to her. They milled around, dazed and unhungry, shuffling
their coupons. Whatever else she was, whatever else shed done, at least
she wasnt somebody who thought that pricing value packs of chicken
parts was entertainment.
She started back with the olives. Sometimes you needed to take stock.
Reassess. Do inventory. It was never too late. People did it all the time.
Got over their addictions, left (or joined) cults, rebuilt their credit, and so
on, and she could do that too. And although she had not been thinking
about the superficial stuff, the appearance stuffmore like, the milk
bottles representing souls in the Catholic religion classes, with the milk
gone black and foul from various venial and mortal sinsshe caught a
glimpse of herself in a display mirror that stopped her cold.
What had she been thinking? Her hair looked like ass. Shed gone
red this last time, a considered, middle-of-the-road red, but it had faded
to a pinky carrot color and her part showed gray. There was lint on her
jacket and her shirt gapped open where it pulled across her boobs, a
sloppy look she hated. It was one of her favorite shirts, black, western
style, with an embroidered yoke and pearl snaps. She wore it because she
liked the idea of being a cowgirl, in a humorous, jokey way. And now she
couldnt wear it anymore, because it made her look like, like, she tended
bar in a bowling alley or something.
Her makeup had been just fine when shed put it on. Or had it really?
3/15/16 4:03 PM
JEAN THOMPSON
Her eyeliner was sinister, reptilian. Thank God the mirror wasnt full
length, or she would have seen what was wrong with the rest of her.
Bonnie headed to the cosmetics shelves, looking for first aid. Not that
she could do anything about the hair except buy a hat. Not that she
wanted to meet Jane at the checkout lane with a box of hair dye in her
hand, an admission of vanity gone wrong. She got out her compact and
smudged some of the eyeliner so it looked a little less like pavement striping. Found a tester for some solid perfume and rubbed it on her wrists.
It smelled like vanilla. Somebody in products marketing had decided that
everyone should smell like vanilla.
Maybe she should start wearing plaid skirts and cashmere sweaters,
get her hair done in a country club bob, wear little gold knots in her ears
instead of gypsy chandeliers. Clean up her act, literally.
Would that help? All this while shed carried on like she was some
kind of female pirate, as if she was allowed her excesses because she was
a creature of tempestuous moods and passions and sensibilities, like an
opera diva or an artist. Except she was not an artist. Had never wanted
to be or tried to be. She had enthusiasms, but no real talents. Mostly she
bought things that were meant to demonstrate her quirky and individualistic tastes. Mostly she had stupid affairs. She was a diva of fucking.
Then, having beat herself up to the point where it no longer mattered
how repulsive she was, she hurried to meet up with Jane, because Janes
husband, Eric, had taken the kids out for some enforced daddy time, and
it would not do to be there when they got back.
Jane was standing in the open space by the deli. She had taken a step
away from her shopping cart and was doing nothing at all, except looking up at the ceiling. Staring, really, with her head back and her mouth
falling open. Was there a bird flying around up there? Something
trapped?
Bonnie walked up to her, checked out the ceiling, saw nothing there,
said, So what is it, huh? And Jane jumped out of her skin, like shed
been surprised in some woodland solitude, and for the briefest moment
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3/15/16 4:03 PM
her face was hard and angry and crazed and she stared at Bonnie like
she didnt recognize her, or maybe she did but she hated her and she
knew? Did she?...
The next instant she was Jane again, and she said, in her usual voice,
I never noticed how big this place is. Warehouse big. I mean, you know
it from walking around, but...
Jane shrugged. She didnt seem especially embarrassed at spacing out
and babbling. Its just a long way down, she said, as if that was an explanation.
Dont you mean, a long way up? Bonnie suggested, deciding to play
it wise-guy cool, a sidekick.
I suppose. Jane looked at the jars of olives that Bonnie presented.
Selected one and put it in the cart. Bonnie left the other jar next to a
display of fancy cheeses. Jane pushed the cart forward, then let it go. It
wheeled a couple of feet forward on its own, then stopped.
Hey, Jane? Still keeping it all in humorous sidekick mode, but a little
concerned now. Earth to Jane.
Jane roused herself, caught up with the cart, and attached herself to
it again. Sorry. Sorry. I think I have everything. Now I just have to decide what to fix tonight.
Thats why I dont ever cook, Bonnie said. I dont think aboutmeals
until Im hungry. Relieved that everything was back to Jane-normal.
Maybe Jane was taking some kind of new antidepressant? Bonnie knew
she had prescriptions, shed taken a lot of different meds in the past for
whatever Jane-depression she suffered from. It was hard for Bonnie to
tell what might be wrong because Jane had always seemed pretty much
the same to her and had for all these years.
Although there had been that one time, requiring hospitalization,
which they were careful not to talk about.
But for now, at least, the little spell of weirdness had passed, and Jane
was once again scrabbling around for her grocery list and her checkbook
and whatever else she needed. She was always doing that, making sure
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3/15/16 4:03 PM
JEAN THOMPSON
she had one thing or another, her wallet, phone, keys, as if the different
parts of her got lost in her big mom-style purse.
There he is again, Bonnie said. She meant the boy theyd seen before whod been having the fight with his girlfriend. Or maybe she just
thought she was his girlfriend. He was a jerk. And the girl was one of
those pitiful types. Sometimes you hated people you didnt even know.
Why was it all so important, the endless stupid back and forth that
wasnt even love after a while. Or never had been. The boy was in line at
one of the self-checkout lanes with a bottle of pop and a bag of some
greasy snack food. His face was thick-featured, expressing absolutely
nothing. What was inside his head? Car parts, probably.
Its hard to tell, isnt it, Jane said, nodding at the boy.
Tell what?
If hes worth it or not.
Bonnie shrugged but didnt answer, and they moved to the checkout
lane and waited their turn. They seemed to have arrived there at one of
those cresting times when everybody in the store was jammed together
up front. In the next lane, a little girl about five years old was squatting
next to a display of tiny bottles, each filled with a different flavor of sugar
water, red, green, orange. One by one, she stuck them in her mouth,
tried to pry the cap loose, then put them back on the rack.
The childs mother was busy unloading her groceries, as well as managing the baby strapped into a carrier, and an older boy who was pestering his mother about something he wanted and didnt get. Were you
supposed to say something? Jane didnt seem to notice, nor anyone else.
The child was oblivious, too young to know she was doing anything
wrong. Fine, let it go, let everybody catch little kid germs. Why did anyone have so many children anyway? It didnt seem necessary.
Their line moved slowly. Of course they had chosen the wrong one.
The mother and children moved toward the door in a straggling group.
The woman ahead of them was buying not only groceries but clothes on
hangers, and there was a price check that kept everyone waiting. Jane
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3/15/16 4:03 PM
said, You know something? Every once in a while, I mean every once in
a long long while, I get these flashes where I think, this is going to sound
so, anyway, sometimes I think I can see the future. Little corners of it.
Jane ducked her head, as if she was either self-conscious or proud of
saying such a thing.
Really? Bonnie said, meaning, what brought that on? She had no idea.
Jane began setting groceries on the belt, arranging the frozen items
together, then the meat, then dairy, produce, and so on. Uh huh. Out of
nowhere. Very unreliable. But when Robbie broke his arm at school? The
day before, I knew it was going to happen. I mean not know know, because of course I would have done something. Kept him home or told
him to be careful on the monkey bars. It was just this random thought
that popped into my head from nowhere.
Wow, Bonnie said. Thats... She meant to go on, say wasnt that
remarkable, and something about the mother-child bond, but the idea of
knowing the future filled her with an unreasoning dread, as if the future
was a lurking thing waiting to catch you off guard. Why dread, why so
fearful? Why not believe in a better tomorrow, a brighter day? What was
wrong with her? The best she could manage was, Well, so what do you
see happening, Miss Psychic?
Like I said, its not very reliable. More of a, I dont know, like when
you think you see the lights flicker? And you wonder if the powers going
out? Jane put the divider bar at the end of her groceries and smiled an
unexpected, impish smile. Silly! I dont even know what Im going to
make for dinner.
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3/15/16 4:03 PM
SIRACUS A
Delia Ephrons Siracusa is a stunning portrait of two marriages coming

unraveled during the stress of travel abroad. Insightful and engaging. A
must-read!
SUE GRAFTON, author of X
DELIA EPHRON is a bestselling author
and screenwriter. She has written novels,

including The Lion Is In and Hanging Up;
humor books for all ages, including How to
Eat Like a Child and Do I Have to Say Hello?;
and nonfiction, most recently Sister Mother
Husband Dog (etc.).Her films include Youve
Got Mail, The Sisterhood of the Traveling
Pants, Hanging Up (based on her novel), and
Michael. Her journalism has appeared in The
New York Times, O: The Oprah Magazine,
Vogue, and Vanity Fair. Her hit play Love,
Loss, and What I Wore (co-written with Nora
Ephron) ran for more than two years
off-Broadway and has been performed all
over the world. She lives in New York City.
deliaephron.com
DeliaEphron
Jacket design by Jaya Miceli | Photograph of the author by Elena Seibert

(front photo) Francesco Santo / Getty Images
(back photo) bepsy / Shutterstock
(flap art) Rainer Lesniewski / Shutterstock
Siracusa is an Italian aria, a Greek tragedy and a modern American masterpiece written by Delia Ephron at the height of her powers. This is a story of
two complicated marriages, one vulnerable child, and a trip to Italy that
changes each of their lives forever. Secrets, lies, love raging, love dying, and
the shame of unrealized potential are exposed in detail under the Sicilian
sun. And, like the Moro blood oranges that grow there with abandon, the
taste is both sour and sweet at once, but the bitterness that remains is not
only haunting but unforgettable.
ADRIANA TRIGIANI, author of The Shoemakers Wife
Siracusa is an unusually crackling, tricky journey into the distant land of
other peoples marriages: their secrets, paradoxes, weaknesses, and pleasures. Delia Ephron writes like a warm-blooded Patricia Highsmith, her storys treachery matched by a deep and easy feel for the various human,
imperfect ways that people find themselves bound together, and sometimes
painstakingly unbind themselves. An absorbing, tense, and original
novel.
MEG WOLITZER, author of The Interestings
Siracusa is dazzling. Here is Delia Ephron with a stunning noir tale of marriage and morality, as two couples tangled in secret longings and betrayals
travel through Italy, along with a gimlet-eyed ten-year-old daughter who
could have been created by Henry James. Beware. You will be up all night to
finish. I was.
MARIE BRENNER, author of Apples and Oranges
The word unputdownable is somewhat overused when describing a good
bookbut really, I just could not put this book down. Delia Ephrons Siracusa
is a dark tale with incredibly well-drawn characters. It reveals the slights
and secrets that can bring about chaos among friends and within families,
and adds more than a spoonful of evil into the bargain. I stayed up well past
my bedtime to finish.
JACQUELINE WINSPEAR, author of theMaisie Dobbs novels
ISBN 978-0-399-16521-4

780399 165214
5 2 6 0 0
DELIA EPHRON SIRACUSA
Praise for
U.S.A. $26.00
Canada $35.00
n electrifying novel about marriage

and deceit from bestselling author Delia
Ephron that follows two couples on vacation
in Siracusa, a town on the coast of Sicily,
where the secrets they have hidden from one
another are exposed and relationships are
unraveled.
New Yorkers Michael, a famous writer,
and Lizzie, a journalist, travel to Italy with
their friends from MaineFinn; his wife,
Taylor; and their daughter, Snow. From the
beginning, says Taylor, it was a conspiracy
for Lizzie and Finn to be together. Told
Rashomon-style in alternating points of view,
the characters expose and stumble upon lies
and infidelities past and present. Snow, ten
years old and precociously drawn into a far
more adult drama, becomes the catalyst for
catastrophe as the novel explores collusion
and betrayal in marriage.
With her inimitable psychological astuteness and uncanny understanding of the
human heart, Ephron delivers a powerful
meditation on marriage, friendship, and the
meaning of travel. Set on the sun-drenched
coast of the Ionian Sea, Siracusa unfolds
with the pacing of a psychological thriller
and delivers an unexpected final act that
none will see coming.
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SIRACU S A
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375 Hudson Street
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Copyright 2016 by Delia Ephron

The Whole Mess...Almost by Gregory Corso from
Herald of Autochthonic Spirit copyright 1973, 1975, 1981 by Gregory Corso.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning,
or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting
writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
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Names: Ephron, Delia, author.

Title: Siracusa / Delia Ephron, author.
Description: New York: Blue Rider Press, [2016].
Identifiers: LCCN 2016007679 (print) | LCCN 2016013168 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780399165214 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101621530 (ePub)
Subjects: LCSH: AmericansItalyFiction. | Married peopleFiction. |
Marital conf lictFiction. | AdulteryFiction. | Domestic fiction. |
BISAC: FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Literary.
Classification: LCC PS3555.P48 S565 2016 (print) | LCC PS3555.P48 (ebook) |
DDC 813/.54dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016007679
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents

either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously,
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Lizzie
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I h av e a s na p s ho t of me standing on Finns shoulders when
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I was t wenty-nine, a trick wed perfected. I would sprint toward
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him and work up enough steam to climb his back to his shoul-
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ders. I look triumphant and not a little surprised to have done
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thisit was unlikely I would ever stand on a mans shoulders,
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having been neither a cheerleader nor a gymnast, and I am not
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physically daring (a deficiency). I was unhappy that day on a
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Maine beach fifteen years ago, but youd never know it from the
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fourbysix glossy. Finn and I broke up that afternoon.
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In the photo I am looking at now, you can read my mind. I
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am depressed. Im hunched on a stone bench, wearing a black
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quilted jacket, not f lattering. There I am looking like winter on
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a June day. Behind me in the distance lies the little port, dotted
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with sailboats and small yachts, one of Siracusas few sweet spots.
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My hair, always a tumble, is messy in a way that suggests I
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hadnt bothered with it. My eyes are hidden behind sunglasses.
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This seems intentional. I was confronting the camera, my face
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Delia Ephron
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turned toward it but f lat. I had neither the inclination nor the
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energy to strike a pose.
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Who took the picture? I cant remember. Events that day are
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muddy. Suppressed? Its been a year and some of us no longer
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speak, not the ones that you would expect or maybe you would.
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I didnt. Since the photo is on my cell, odds are Michael is the
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photographer, although possibly not, because I am centered in
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the photo. The subjects in Michaels shots are frequently missing
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the tops of their heads or their arms.
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Snow should never have been on the vacation at all. It was a
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g rown-ups trip, but Taylor never went anywhere without her,
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so Finn said. Although you never know in a marriage who is
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responsible for what, do you? Husbands and wives collaborate,
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hiding even from themselves who is calling the shots and who is
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along for the ride.
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She was ten years old and a mystery, Finn and Taylors daugh-
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ter. She is brilliant, said Taylor, but in England the year before
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Snow had spoken rarely and then softly. Her mother had ordered
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for her. The waiter would look at Snow studying the menu,
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clearly intelligent, and Taylor would speak. Snow often read
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straight through a meal, the iPad on her lap. When I asked her
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a direct question, she looked to her mother. Anxious, Id
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thought. For rescue. You prefer milk chocolate, dont you?
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said Taylor. You loved that movie Pitch Perfect? Didnt we see it
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three times?
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For Michael and me Snow was wallpaper.
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Ive barely begun, and undoubtedly with that remark, Ive
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turned you against me. Im like that, unpleasantly blunt. Some
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s i r ac u s a
people like it, some hate it. I tend not to worry. Finn would be
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horrified to hear that even if he were not Snows father, but not
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Michael because hes a writer. Writers often forgive cruel obser-
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vations. They even admire them. It makes them feel empow-
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ered, justified, off the hook for their own ruthless words. For
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doing that thing writers think is their right: taking a friend,
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swallowing him (or her) whole, and turning him into a charac-
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ter to suit their own fictional purposes.
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The trip was my idea, a moment of spontaneity, enthusiasm,
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and slight inebriation. Liquor played a role right from the start.
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Since our summer f ling years before, Finn and I had main-
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tained an attachment that neither of us fully understood. We
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were given to bursts of email intimacy, intense for a few months,
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then lapsing for longer. The intermittent friendship was solely
14
between us. Wed been at each others weddings, but the four of
15
us never got together socially. Then I discovered that by chance
16
wed all be in London at the same time. We had dinner. Then
17
another and another. We had little in common (except that Finn
18
and I had history, which is not quite the same as something
19
in common). They werent from our

world
Michaels and
20
minewhich turned out to be relaxing, and yet they were curi-
21
ous and playful. Especially Finn. Taylor was obsessed with c ulture,
22
which I admired, although I wasnt. Good travelers, different
23
travelers. Where should we meet next year? Id said on our
24
last night together. I raised my glass. To next year.
25
26
I still wonder about that moment. What if Id let that con-
S27
vivial feeling pass?
N28
Taylor mostly planned the trip, her thing, fine by me. Michael
7/28/16 6:26 PM
Delia Ephron
01
normally scours travel books for weeks before we leave, hunting
02
out the obscure and off beaton a trip to Paris hed whisked me
03
off to the Muse de la Vie Romantique to see a cast of George
04
Sands arm and her lovers too, Chopinbut he was in the home
05
stretch on a novel and utterly preoccupied.
06
Im used to this. Ive done it to him. I havent written a novel,
07
nothing major like that, but I write too, mostly articles for mag-
08
azines and websites. Writers have to allow each other a private
09
world. Finishing is always more compelling than anything else,
10
than anything real. A thrilling narcissism sets in. Its so much fun.
11
I could never deprive Michael of that. I was good about tolerating
12
it. I took pride in tolerating it. I put up with silent dinners
13
aWhat? two minutes after Id said something interesting.
14
Its not a good time to go anywhere, he said.
15
Its too late to cancel. Its all in the works, much of it paid
16
for. A break may help you, it really might. Please. I want it
17
desperately.
18
19
An eight-day vacationhow could that hurt when I was

adrift? Panicked. It was the most difficult time of my life.
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27S
28N
7/28/16 6:26 PM
31p6 49p6 SPINE: 5p7.5
is an American political consultant, commentator, educator, actor, attorney, media personality,

and prominent liberal pundit. Carville gained
national attention for his work as the lead strategist of the successful 1992 presidential campaign
of Bill Clinton. Carville was a cohost of CNNs
Crossfire until its final broadcast in June 2005,
and since then he has appeared on CNNs news
program The Situation Room. Carville is the
author of several books and currently teaches
political science at Tulane University.
carville.info
JamesCarville
Jacket design by Jason Booher | Jacket images: (Trump) by Justin Sullivan/

Getty Images; (elephant) Shutterstock | Photograph of the author by
Jesse Grant/Getty Images

9780399576225_WereStillRight_jk__r2.indd 1
JAMES CARVILLE
JAMES
CARVILLE
WERE STILL RIGHT THEYRE STILL WRONG
JAMES CARVILLE
That Democrats have bested Republicans on

so many issues is not because Democrats are
lucky or clairvoyant. Democrats have been
right because ours is the superior position,
because our brand of progressivism works
and the Republicans brand of conservatism
doesnt. But as many problems as the Republicans have, we Democrats have a problem,
too. Its not that the evidence isnt on our
sideit is. Our problem is that too many
people ignore that evidence. The snag in our
political system is not that Democrats are
right but that it hasnt mattered. At least not
as much as it should.
Were still right, theyre still wrong. And
Im going to prove it to you.
IN
WERE
STILL
RIGHT THEYRE
THE DEMOCRATS
CASE FOR 2016
STILL
JAMES
CARVILLE WRONG
U.S.A. $25.00
CANADA $34.00
his 1996 #1 New York Times

bestseller Were Right, Theyre Wrong, political
strategist James Carville eviscerated the Republican economic agenda and debunked many of
the GOPs ludicrous positions on national issues
such as health care, welfare, tax reform, and economic growth.
Now, twenty years after that books publication, Carville acknowledges that not much has
changed. In fact, he maintains that it was the
Democratic policies enacted by presidents Clinton and Obama that salvaged Americas financial
well-being during the last two decades, saving
us from a collapse that George W. Bush and the
Republican congressional majorities inspired.
In Were Still Right, Theyre Still Wrong,
Carville analyzes how the Republican Party has
ultimately failed to deliver on its promises and
how Donald J. Trumpthe partys likely nominee in the 2016 presidential electionis the
embodiment of that failureand worse. Make no
mistake, says Carville: Trumps ascendance is no
accident, but is instead a revealing sign that the
GOP is intellectually bankrupt and on the wrong
side of todays critical issues, including economic inequality and global warming. Written
with Carvilles trademark sarcasm, folksiness,
wit, and down-home common sense, Were Still
Right, Theyre Still Wrong is a timely guide for
voters, politicians, and journalists trying to make
sense of our countrys most divisive and contentious election of the century.
1608
WITH RYAN JACOBS
7/6/16 10:23 AM
we r e
still
still
e
r
Y
the
JAMES CARVILLE
WITH RYAN JACOBS
Blue Rider Press New York
9780399576225_StillWrong_TX_pi-xxiv_1-248.indd vii
7/14/16 1:55 PM

375 Hudson Street
Copyright 2016 by Gaslight, Inc.

voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you
for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with
copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it
in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing
ISBN 9780399576225
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Book design by Lauren Kolm
9780399576225_StillWrong_TX_pi-xxiv_1-248.indd viii
7/14/16 1:55 PM
6.125 9.25 SPINE: 1.4375
Nicholson Baker has produced both a tribute to and an indictment of American education,
and he has done so with a winning blend of mordant wit and effulgent idealism. He hasnt
quite worked out how to fix the system, but he has diagnosed its many ills and, equally,
recognized how much of value survives even in impossible classrooms with impossible
kids. Substitute is both intimate and inclusive, and it is written with brio.
Andrew Solomon, National Book Award winner and author of Far from the Tree
Nicholson Baker
is the author of ten novels and five

works of nonfiction, including The
Anthologist, The Mezzanine, and
Human Smoke. He has won the
National Book Critics Circle Award,
the Hermann Hesse Prize, and a
Katherine Anne Porter Award from
the American Academy of Arts and
Letters. He lives in Maine with his
wife, Margaret Brentano; both their
children went to Maine public
schools.
Nicholson Baker has given us a funny and heartbreaking close-up of life in todays American schools. Nice kids and well-meaning teachers are trapped in a boring, intellectually
stifling system: endless vocabulary lists unconnected to central ideas, writing assignments
that are basically fill-in-the-blanks, constant surveillance to prevent kids from escaping into
video games, pervasive concentration on taking, recording, and retaking tests. Surely we
can do better than this.
Nel Noddings
Lee Jacks Professor of Child Education Emerita, Stanford University,
and author of A Richer, Brighter Vision for American High Schools
Equal parts heartbreaking and heartwarming, Substitute provides an eye-opening
look at the challenges within the American public education system. Rich with
empathy and nearly impossible to put down, Substitute is a must-read for parents,
educators, and anyone else who cares about the future of our children.
Katie Hurley, LCSW, author of The Happy Kid Handbook

In a weird and wild twenty-eight days, Nicholson Baker faithfully reports on the
aspirations, tedium, humanity, and chaos brewing in American schools. Substitute
is a wry, riveting, and potent account, where little adornment is needed. Baker
understands that there is no more telling way to reveal the current and future state
of our society than showing how millions of our schoolchildren spend their days.
Ed Boland, New York Timesbestselling author of The Battle for Room 314
Jacket design by Spencer Kimble
Photograph of the author by Margaret Brentano

ISBN 978-0-399-16098-1
9780399160981_Substitute_JK_R07.indd 1
780399 160981
Substitute
Nicholson
Baker
Substitute
Substitute
Praise for
Nicholson Baker
U.S.A. $30.00
Canada $40.00
In 2014, after a brief orientation

course and a few fingerprinting
sessions, Nicholson Baker became
an on-call substitute teacher in a
Maine public school district. He
awoke to the dispatchers five-forty
a.m. phone call and headed to
one of several nearby schools;
when he got there, he did his best
to follow lesson plans and help his
students get something done. What
emerges from Bakers experience is a
complex, often touching deconstruction
of public schooling in America: children
swamped with overdue assignments, overwhelmed by the marvels and distractions of
social media and educational technology,
and staff who weary themselves trying to
teach in step with an often outmoded or overly
ambitious standard curriculum.
In Bakers hands, the inner life of the
classroom is examined anewmundane worksheets, recess time-outs, surprise nosebleeds,
rebellions, griefs, jealousies, minor triumphs,
kindergarten show-and-tell, daily lessons on
everything from geology to metal tech to the
Holocaustas he and his pupils struggle to
find ways to get through the day. Baker is one
of the most inventive and remarkable writers
of our time, and Substitute, filled with humor,
honesty, and empathy, may be his most
impressive work of nonfiction yet.
5 3 0 0 0
1609
7/22/16 10:33 AM
Substitute
GOING TO SCHOOL
WITH A THOUSAND
KIDS
Nicholson Baker
B LU E R I D E R P R E S S
New York
9780399160981_Substitute_i-xii_1-724.indd 7
10/7/16 8:07 AM

375 Hudson Street
Copyright 2016 by Nicholson Baker

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes
free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this
book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing
any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and
allowingPenguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Blue Rider Press is a registered trademark and its colophon is a
trademark of Penguin Random House LLC
Excerpts from Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss, copyright by Dr. Seuss Enterprises, L.P.,
1963, renewed 1991. Used by permission of Random House Childrens Books,
a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Names: Baker, Nicholson, author.
Title: Substitute : going to school with a thousand kids / Nicholson Baker.
Description: New York, New York : Blue Rider Press, 2016. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016030181 | ISBN 9780399160981 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Substitute teachersBiography. | Baker, Nicholson. |
BISAC: EDUCATION / Philosophy & Social Aspects. | SOCIAL SCIENCE /
Anthropology / Cultural. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Childrens Studies.
Classification: LCC LB2844.1.S8 B28 2016 | DDC 371.14/122dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030181
13579108642
Book design by Michelle McMillian
Some names have been changed.
10/7/16 8:07 AM
Day One. Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Lasswell High School, Special Ed Math
S M AL L B U T H O STI L E
The call came in at five-forty in the morning, plinking from under

my pillow. Would I be interested in filling in for a day for a math
teacher named Mrs. Prideaux, in a resource room at the high school? I
said Id give it a shot, and I kissed my sleepy wife and took a shower and
put on my good shoes and a sport jacket and drove for a long time in the
dark, over hilly rural roads, eating a toasted waffle. There had been a
sudden thaw overnight, and the predawn traffic moved slowly through
the side-sliding snowmist.
The buses, about twenty of them, were already queuing up as I reached
the turn into the parking lot, where a sign announced that Lasswell High
School was a tobacco-free area. I parked in the back, near the athletic
field, a blank white plain with low shapes of cold fog slipping through the
goalposts.
Hundreds of slow-moving, sleepy students were getting off buses and
filing into a pair of side doors, supervised by several silent adults with
clipboards. The idling engines of the buses made a heavy, steady noise;
they exhaled plumes of exhaust, like cows waiting to be milked. There
was a big stop sign on the door, ordering visitors to check in at the front
office.
10/7/16 8:07 AM
[ 16 ]
NICHOLSON BAKER
I told one of the grownups that I was a substitute and asked where the
office was. He pointed down a hall. Thank you for helping out, he said.
I waved.
It was warm and brightly fluorescent insidenot loud. Students with
expressionless early-morning faces were leaning against lockers or kneeling
on the floor going through their backpacks or hugging in corners. One of
the secretaries, a small, pleasant, q
uick-moving woman in a gray cocktail
dress, gave me a folder full of papers and a lanyard with a tag on it that said
SUBSTITUTE, and she took me to room 18 and unlocked the door. It was
a small hot space, with about ten desks, some bookshelves, some cabinets,
and a whiteboard. Taped to the wall was an information sheet on attention
deficit disorder. The walls were cinderblock, painted a cream color.
Here are your attendance sheets, the secretary said. Ive highlighted
the different blocks that you have. All you need to do is mark them absent
or tardy and then have a student bring them down to the office. There
were two lunches, she explained, and I had Lunch B, which began in the
middle of block 4, at 11:49 a.m.
I thanked her and she went away. I sat down at the desk. There was a
SpongeBob jar on it filled with pencils and dry-erase markers, and piles
of student papers and worksheets and abandoned notebooks. A teacher
plump and capable lookingstopped by to introduce herself.
Anything I should know? I said.
There are some challenging kids, because this is all special ed, she
said. But Helens had subs before and it goes pretty well. Im close and
happy to help if I can. She went away. I opened the folder and read Mrs.
Prideauxs sub plans.
Six electric bongs came over the PA system, followed by a longer boop,
and then a secretarys voice came on. Good morning, please stand for the
Pledge of Allegiance. I stood in the empty room, but I didnt speak,
because there was nobody in the room with me yet. I pledge allegiance to
the flag of the United States of America, said the secretary over the
loudspeaker, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under
God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Please pause for a moment
10/7/16 8:07 AM
SUBSTITUTE
[ 17 ]
of silence. There was a moment of silence, another electric boop, and

then she said, Thank you, and have a great day. School was in session. It
got very quiet. I had no students.
After a long time, the electric bongs bonged again, and it was the
beginning of block 1. A girl walked in. Hello, I said. Hello, she said.
She dropped her backpack by a desk. I asked her her name and checked it
off on a list. She left. A boy came in and sat down and opened a container
of diced fruit. I checked his name off on the attendance sheet. Another
kid came in and began looking through the cupboards, opening them
and closing them rapidly.
How are you doing? I said.
Good, he said. In one of the cupboards he found a bag of cheese-
f lavored popcorn. He sat down.
Whats your name?
Jack.
Hi, Jack, good to meet you. Im Nick. Are you in this class?
No, but I usually come over here from across the hall and do work.
He sat and ate popcorn, blinking sleepily.
I asked him what kind of math he was supposed to be working on.
Im doing something else, Im working on history. He said he was
researching the Vietnam War.
Interesting, I said. So who started it?
He didnt answer.
Hard to say, right? I said. Goes way back into the mists of time.
People say Kennedy wanted to get us out of Vietnam. Do you think
he did?
I think so, said Jack.
I read a supplemental part of the sub plans, which was in capitals.
ALGEBRA 2 STUDENTS WILL COME IN WITH BREAKFAST AND
MAY BE A LITTLE LATE. IVE BEEN SOMEWHAT EASY ON THEM
BECAUSE THEYRE GOOD WORKERS.
People seem to wander in and out of this room, I said to Jack.
Yeah, they do.
10/7/16 8:07 AM
[ 18 ]
NICHOLSON BAKER
So what do you like better, math or history?

Probably history.
More students stopped by the door, saw that I was a substitute, and
left to prowl the halls in search of friends. A girl wrote something on a
Postit note and asked me to sign it. It was permission for her to go to the
library.
Should I have signed that? I asked Jack.
Probably not, he said.
I checked off some more names. They were juniors, it turned out.
Some, who were taking Algebra II, were supposed to log on to a piece of
software called MobyMax and take a test on their core curriculum
standards. Some took it, some didnt.
The bonger bonged again and some new students showed up. These
were chattier. People were waking up now. I met a kid named Clyde who
was interested in trucks and wore a plaid shirt and a baseball hat. He said
he made good money by plowing peoples driveways. His grandfather had
gotten him a truck which was completely rusted o
utyou could see the
road through the floor, he said, and it wouldnt pass inspectionso
his father found him another truck on Craigslist for fifteen hundred
dollars that he was happy with. Clyde told me that it was tricky to plow
driveways right now, because the ground was starting to thaw. If its a paved
driveway, then you can just drop the plow down on the asphalt, but
if its a dirt driveway, you dont want to rip up the surface by plowing
too deep. You get a feel for it after a while, he said.
Another kid named Shamus came in, a quietly amused young man,
also wearing a baseball hat, who turned out to have a girlfriend named
Rianne. Rianne was r ound-faced and pale and wore very tight black pants
and a b
lack-and-pink-striped shirt and she worked at McDonalds. Shed
worked until three in the morning the night before, closing the store. I
dont sleep, she said. That was how she got through high school, she said,
by not sleeping. She leaned against Shamus with her eyes closed, while
Shamus looked at videos on his iPad.
Shamuss friend Artie appeareda loud, jokey storyteller, who liked
10/7/16 8:07 AM
SUBSTITUTE
[ 19 ]
to get as close as he could to dropping the fbomb without actually

dropping it: I was like What the fffffff...udge? He was stocky and
handsome, and he spent his time trying to find good-looking bathing
beauties on his iPad from websites that werent blocked. He was supposed
to be doing a geometry worksheet.
Ms. Laronde, a young ed techa teaching a ssistantcame in to help
Artie. She reminded him of the difference between complementary and
supplementary angles. In a soft, faintly ironic voice, Ms. Laronde
questioned and coaxed and prodded and finally got him to write his name
at the top of the worksheet. That was all the geometry he didhe wrote
his name. Besides that he told stories and said unexpected things. My
horrible fear is when you wake up and one of your eyes is swollen shut, he
suddenly announced. Im probably going to die at the age of f orty-five.
Ms. Laronde left to coach other students with Individualized
Education Plans and Artie and Shamus began talking about milk. Artie
said, Boobies, cow boobies, thats where the milk comes from. He told a
story about his little brother, who was seven. They were listening to
Eminem and his little brother said, Shut off those nigga beats. Artie
said, Those arent nigga beats, those are cracker beats. Later Arties
father came home and asked what theyd been doing. His little brother
said, We were listening to cracker beats.
The sub plans said I was supposed to discourage a tall, wiry kid named
Lucas from playing on his iPad. I tried. Lucas and his friend, who wasnt
on the attendance sheet but who was allowed to visit, according to Mrs.
Prideaux, were interested in watching YouTube videos of pickup trucks
driving around in fields of m
uda sport called mudding. Some of the
mudding trucks were dualliestrucks with two pairs of tires in the back.
One truck was notable in that it had dually tires in the front and the back.
How can you even steer with duallies in the front? Lucass friend asked.
They tipped their iPads in each others direction: Whoa, thats a nice
truck!
Thats badass, I have to say, said Artie, leaning over.
Check this out, said Lucas.
10/7/16 8:07 AM
[ 20 ]
NICHOLSON BAKER
A huge wave of mud spewed out from monster tires. Oooh, nice,
they said.
Adam, who had chewedup fingernails, showed me a picture on his
iPad of his four-wheeler. It had two speeds. Youre supposed to drive up a
hill in first, he said, but hed had to shift to second to make progress. It
isnt dangerous unless youre stupid, he added.
The electric bongs happened again, and it was a new block. A sad girl
showed up. Shed been crying because her boyfriend had broken up with
her. Rianne hugged her and stroked her cheek. Shamus said, I could put
up my kickstand for you. Then, imitating a teacher, he said, in a low
voice, That is not acceptable!
Ill tell you whats not acceptable, said Artie. What if I whipped
down my pants and took a shit on your grave?
Shamus and Rianne laughed. Later Rianne tried to take a nap lying on
Shamuss lap.
Another teaching assistant showed up for a little w
hilevery young,
arecent graduate of the high school. Hed grown a goatee to look older
than the students. He joshed with the young men about trucks, about
jobs, about snowplowing, and about somebodys older brother. His name
was Mr. C.
When the mudding videos got too loud, I told the trucker boys to turn
them downand they did. They were, in a way, polite. Every so often I
would prod a student to work on math. Math is like my worst subject, one
of them said. Its just stupid. I dont understand it. I hate it. Its a total waste.
But one kid, Colin, with a wavy shock of hair, sat silently the whole
time, earbuds in, listening to music, crouched over, doing homework,
erasing and rewriting answers.
When I stood up, several people said, Youre tall! How tall are you?
The morning went by slowly. My head felt stuffed with cotton balls and
I had trouble sitting up and looking authoritative. There was no coffee
machine, so I sipped a Coke to stay alert. I sighed loudly at one point, and
Clyde gave me a sympathetic look. I hear you, he said. I feel your pain.
10/7/16 8:07 AM
SUBSTITUTE
[ 21 ]
The clock was an hour off because of daylight savings, which had
just happened. Youre lucky you werent here yesterday, said Clyde.
Everybody was grumpy. People were standing in the hallway y ellingit
was bad.
Suddenly the bonger bonged for lunch. By the time I got out to the car
I realized I didnt have time to drive somewhere and buy a sandwich, so I
ate three Blue Diamond almonds I found in my car and drank the rest of
my Coke.
Back at my desk, I studied the sub plans for what was supposed to
happen after lunch. A girl, Charlee, had written a paper, and I was
supposed to help her finish her bibliography, which needed to have at
least three sources in it. She was sitting, staring into space, listening to
music, looking goth but neat. And bored.
So, youre working on a paper, I said.
Charlee nodded.
What about the bibliography?
She sighed.
What are you writing about?
Oh, we had to write about an animal.
An animal! Thats pretty gripping, pretty interesting.
Isnt it? she said sarcastically.
Of course, it depends on the animal, I said. What did you choose?
The wolverine.
I thought that was a shoe, I said.
It could be a brand of shoe, but its a damn wolverine, Charlee said.
Ill show you. She tipped her iPad toward me.
Oh, its a small, friendly, furry creature, I said.
Its like me, said Charlee. Small but hostile.
Artie called out, Girl, get your ass to work!
She began talking to her friend about what they were doing after
school: they both had orientation and training at a Hannaford
supermarket, where theyd just gotten jobs.
10/7/16 8:07 AM
[ 22 ]
NICHOLSON BAKER
I was also supposed to encourage a certain boy, Logan, to finish a

health assessment on suicide. He only has one section left! said the
sub plans.
I went over to him. So youre working on something about suicide?
Yeah. Logan was a serious kid, in a gray, zippedup hoodie, with
short hair and black eyebrows.
And youve got one section left?
Yeah, Im not going to do that, thats for extra credit. He showed me
what hed done. Hed been given a transcript of an actual call to a suicide
prevention unit in which a despairing man talked ramblingly about how
he had no reason to live, and about how much he wanted to die. Logan
had, as asked, highlighted the warning phrases of suicidality with a
yellow highlighter.
Thats quite an assignment, I said.
Logan said, Yeah, I know.
Well, youre almost there, youre on the home stretch, finish it up if
you can.
He began playing a video game on the iPad, in which two hoppy
animated creatures leapt up and down on a mountain range. Then his
iPad froze. My iPad froze! he said indignantly.
And so the day ticked by. Nobody wreaked havoc or did anything
toohorrible. On the other hand, only a few students did anything that
Lasswell High School would define as actual work. At a guess, Id say
that1 percent of total class timeno, less than thatwas taken up with
algebra, geometry, health, history, language arts, or any other subject that
the school was supposedly in the business of teaching. And yet, so what?
I liked the kids and felt that given their forced idleness and the futility of
their academic days, they were doing an impressive job of staying sane
and keeping their senses of humor.
The means they had available to pass time productively had improved
dramatically because of the iPad. In the old days, they would have made
spitballs, or poked their n
eighborsnow they could watch mudding
10/7/16 8:07 AM
SUBSTITUTE
[ 23 ]
videos, which actually interested them, or take pictures of each other, or

play chirpy video games. The iPad had improved their lives.
Nobody expected most of them to do academic work, it seemed,
because long ago theyd been labeled as kids with special needseven
though in fact they were, judging by their vocabulary, their temperament,
and their fluent way with irony, normal American high schoolers. They
werent masterminds, but that wasnt why they were in this roomthey
were here because they quietly refused to do work that they hated.
At the very end of the day, just before the bell rang, everybody gathered
by the door. I began putting the computers away. (There were, in addition
to the ubiquitous iPads, carts full of old Apple laptops.) Lydia, a girl with
braces, in a pink sweatshirt, came in, very keyedup and wild. She began
throwing a pen around. I said, Hey, hey, hey.
Stop it, or the substitute wont come back, said her friend Shelby.
Ill be back, I said. I enjoyed it.
See, he enjoyed it, said Lydia.
I felt like a figure of fun, but not so like a figure of fun that I didnt
want to do it again. I hadnt helped anybody learn anything, Id just
allowed them to be themselves; I was there for a day to ensure that room
18 didnt descend into utter chaos. My role was to function as straight
man, to give these kids the pleasure of avoiding meaningless schoolwork.
And that was maybe a useful role.
The final six bells bonged and everybody surged out and the room
was empty again. I wrote a note to Mrs. Prideaux saying that the kids
hadbeen good-natured and funny, and that I was grateful to have had a
chance to fill in. As I was driving home, I remembered something Clyde,
the snowplower, had said. Youve got your good kids and youve got your
bad kids. And sometimes your bad kids can be your good kids.
And that was the end of Day One.
10/7/16 8:07 AM
6 9 SPINE: 0.8125
A S T U N N I N G , P R OVO CAT I V E N E W N OV E L
SE P T
2016
from New York Timesbestselling author Marisa Silver,

Little Nothing is the story of Pavla, a child scorned for her physical
deformity, whose passion and salvation lie in her otherworldly
ability to transform herself and the world around her.
I N A N U N N A M E D C O U N T RY at the beginning of the last century, a child called
Pavla is born to peasant parents. Her arrival, fervently anticipated and conceived in part by
gypsy tonics and archaic prescriptions, stuns her parents and brings outrage from her community. Pavla has been born a dwarf, beautiful in face, but as the years pass, she grows no
further than the edge of her crib. When her parents turn to the treatments of a local doctor
and freak-sideshow proprietor, his terrifying cure opens the floodgates of persecution for Pavla.
Little Nothing unfolds across a lifetime of unimaginable, magical transformation in and out of
human form as this outcast woman is hunted down, her body broken and her identity stripped
away, until her soul is strong enough to transcend all physical bounds. Woven throughout is
the journey of Danilo, the young man entranced by Pavla, obsessed only with protecting her.
Part allegory about the shifting nature of being, part subversive fairy tale of love in all its uncanny guises, Little Nothing spans the beginning of a new century, the disintegration of ancient
superstitions, and the adoption of industry and invention. With a cast of remarkable characters,
a wholly shocking and original story, and extraordinary, page-turning prose, Silver delivers
a novel of sheer electricity.
Bader Howar
MARISA SILVER is the author of the novel Mary Coin, a New York
Times bestseller and winner of the Southern California Independent
Booksellers Award. She is also the author of The God of War (a Los Angeles
Times Book Prize finalist), No Direction Home, and two story collections,
Alone With You and Babe in Paradise (a New York Times Notable Book and
a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year). Her first short story appeared in
the New Yorker when she was featured in the magazines first Debut Fiction
issue. Silvers fiction has won the O. Henry Award and been included
in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and other
anthologies. She lives in Los Angeles.
National broadcast and online advertising Targeted outreach to book clubs

Early reads programs Major online promotion campaign Reading group guide
Major print review coverage in newspapers and magazines Online reviews and
blog coverage 8-city book tour: Los Angeles; San Francisco; New York; Boston; Washington, DC; Miami; Chicago; Minneapolis; plus others by invitation.
For publicity information, please contact Brian Ulicky at (212) 366-2937
or at bulicky@penguinrandomhouse.com.
Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency
Coming in September 2016 from Blue Rider Press, a member of Penguin Random House LLC
Fiction/Contemporary Women 6" 9" 352 pages ISBN 978-0-399-16792-8 $27.00 ($36.00 CAN)
UNCORRECTED PROOF / NOT FOR SALE
A DVA N C E U N C O R R E CT E D P R O O F S. N OT F O R SA L E .
LittleNothing_galley.indd 1
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Little Nothing
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marisa silver
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blue rider press

New York
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9780399167928_Little_i-xii_1-340_5P.indd 7
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375 Hudson Street
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Copyright 2016 by Marisa Silver

or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting
writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data
Names: Silver, Marisa, author.
Title: Little nothing / Marisa Silver.
Description: New York : Blue Rider Press, [2016]
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Contemporary Women. |
FICTION / Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology.
Classification: LCC PS3619.I55 L58 2016 | DDC 813/.6dc23
p.cm.
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Illustrations by Jason Booher

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edstavte si kvtinu! the midwife yells, her voice reach
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ingthe baby as warped and concave sounds. Pictuuure a
flowaahhherrr.
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the baby could stretch its arm it might touch it. You bitch! the
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Next, another voice, closer this time, the sound so near that if
voice howls. You monster! Get out of me now! Agta Janek is
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wished for it and prayed for it, consulted the gypsy witch Zlata,
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gin for it. But old as she isand tough threads of gray streak her
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her pubis where there was once a dark, luxurious t hatchthe old
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moment. It was a cautionary bedtime story chanted night after
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enraged that this should be happening to her even though she has
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and buried amulets of animal bones wrapped in the hair of a vir
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hair and sprout from the colorless mole on her chin and thinly veil
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stories of childhood hold sway. Her mother warned her about this
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night: little Agta, the prettiest girl in the village, lives in a mag
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ical paradise filled with delicious honey-scented medovnik and
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Marisa Silver
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talking bunny rabbits. Then one day, a terrible monster comes
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than her favorite candies that hang from the Christmas tree each
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and whispers in her ear words sweeter than any jam, sweeter even
year and which she is forbidden to pull off until Christmas Day,
even though this means surrendering the low-hanging chocolate
treasures to the mice and rats who skitter across the floorboards
at night and gorge themselves, their nocturnal pleasures mapped
by a trail of black pellets. But little Agta cannot resist the tanta
lizing whispers of the monster and she allows him to touch her
face and stroke her body and climb on top of her and shove his
hard sausage between her soft thighs. Unh...unh, her mother

would grunt, her voice a striking imitation of the guttural efforts
Agta heard most nights coming from behind the thin lace cur
tain that separated her parents bed from the one she shared with
her five brothers and sisters. And then, what next? Her mother
would continue: Pretty Agta grows fat as a pig, fat as a cow. Her
little tzitzis, once tender and delicate as meringue, become achy and
so swollen they have to be held up by a harness of cloth that winds

round her back and halters at the nape of her neck. Months go by,
and the beautiful, smooth skin of her belly becomes striped like a
zebras as her flesh stretches and pulls. And then finally, after back
ache and fat fingers and a burning in her gut so fierce she will think
a match has been struck inside her, Agtas body will split in two.
First the body and then the heart. Good night. Sleep tight.
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The bedbugs will surely bite.
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her head with false sympathy for her daughters pain.
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But her mother is long dead and is not here to sigh and shake
7/16/16 9:55 AM
little nothing
A flowwerrrr openingggg, the midwife calmly insists.
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You bitch, you whore, you fucking fuck! Agta rages, her
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voice becoming clearer to the baby as it begins to swim through
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the dark tunnel, its head pushing against something hard, then
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boat, banging up against rocks then drifting into a calm eddy
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more. You ugly whore who no man will fuck even with his eyes
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The midwife laughs. She has heard far worse. A rose open
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something soft, then something hard again, as if it were a flimsy
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only to be drawn back helplessly into the propelling current once
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closed!
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ing, she persists, the petals pushing out...out...Ano. Ano.
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The baby twists down and up a U valve, which is something
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(who, by the way, is nowhere to be heard, who is hiding in the
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it will get to know very well when Vclav Janek, the father,
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chicken coop that smells like hell, having been neglected by his
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set his child to crawling around the crude plumbing of the first
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wife these past t wenty-seven hours of her hair-raising labor) will
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sinks and toilets in the village.
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see the bud...
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thinks he is making love to a m

irror
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And the midwife shouts: Its blooooming, blooming, I can
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A whore with so much hair growing on your face a man
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It reaches for the sunlight, up and up and up a nd
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Agta lets loose with a wretched sound that is so loud in the
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babys narrow ear canal that the dawning light is occluded by the
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sheer thickness of the roar.
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Yes! Yes! A rose! A beautiful pink...a beautiful...a
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7/16/16 9:55 AM
Marisa Silver
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And now, Vclav hears nothing coming from the house, not
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phant exclamations of the midwife who can add one more to her
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the curses of his wife, nor the scream of an infant, nor the trium
tally of live births, only the infernal squawking of the hens. In
his panic he picks up a cackling rooster and stuffs its head under
his armpit, an action he will regret when he has to buy a replace

ment for the suffocated bird.
The silence is so dense that it is just as hard on the babys
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eardrums as any sound. It is the silence that will become a refrain,
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a villager pushes her children behind her skirts as she passes in
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when a stranger falls speechless in the childs presence, or when
the narrow market lanes to protect them from what might be

catching. The child will learn to hear the complicated messages
that fill these silences just the way, years later, imprisoned, it will
stand in an unlit cell and study the darkness until all the hues
that make it up have been accounted for and named, a painstak
ing ritual that proves that out of nothing comes everything.
Just as now, out of that hush comes a sound at first so soft that
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it could be a whisper traveling from the farthest star, from the
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tory, all wars, all arguments between husbands and wives, all the
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outer reaches of the universe where all time goes, where all his
unanswered wishes of mothers for their children to be perfect
and to live long and happy lives gather and mingle, making small
talk about the deluded humans who thought that the past was
something that could be put away and forgotten, who believed
7/16/16 9:55 AM
little nothing
that the future was a story they could make their own. The small
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sound begins to stretch and expand until it finally ruptures:
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Ayeeeee! Agta howls in fright. What is this thing?
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This thing, of course, is a baby. Forty centimeters of baby to
be precise, although no one bothers to measure. No one thinks to
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delicate washing, the finger and toe counting, the near-scholarly
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enact the rituals of inspection that normally attend a birththe
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examination of genitalia for signs of future procreative success.

No one offers that the child looks like the father (eyes like
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shaped like a perfect raspberry-colored bow that Agta will fi
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the downward smile of nail parings) or that it has a mouth

nally but not now, not yet, claim as her legacy even though she is
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and have nearly collapsed inside her mouth. No one mentions
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so old that her lips are no longer supported by a full set of teeth
that the baby has hair the color of dead grandmother Ljuba,
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sons is to lay claim, to stamp the child as family so that when the
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onewill know to whom it belongs. For Vclav and Agta to as
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child they have prayed for, waited for, that comes to them after
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attention and about Agtas womb being filled with cobwebs
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whose flaxen locks were her pride, for to make these compari
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cord is cut and the baby is finally free of Agtas body, every
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sert ownership would be to admit that they are cursed, that this
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neighbors have joked about Vclav still being able to stand at
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has turned out to be this thing, this foreshortened object, this
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7/16/16 9:55 AM
Marisa Silver
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disproportionate dollhouse version of an infant. It is as though,
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given only leftovers, the hardened heels of bread and the tough
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coming so late to the feast, the plumber and his wife have been
ends of beef, that others have passed over.
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A girl, Vclav says, still smelling of feathers and dead rooster.
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unwrap the swaddling to reveal the naked declaration of its
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He hasnt yet touched the child, only ordered the midwife to
worth. He speaks with a little hitch of satisfaction as if the sex

somehow proves that the fault is not his. Agta, who has not yet
looked at her daughter since that first, alarming view, lies on the
bloodstained bed with her back turned away from the onion bas
ket that serves as a cradle, staring at the varicose cracks in the

wall, praying either to sleep herself to death or to wake from
what must surely be a nightmare. All the while she murmurs: Is

it real? It isnt real. Is it? Even when the baby mews from hunger,
Agta does not reach for her. What use are her false comforts?
her milk has not yet begun to flow. The midwife shows Vclav
how to settle the baby with sugar water, collects her money, then
leaves the house in a hurry, not eager to prolong her association
with this blighted birth and damage her reputation.
A day later, Agtas milk has still not come in, but she is not
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surprised that it is unwilling to spend itself on such a lost cause.
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bering what she has brought into the world, sleeps again, leaving
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Exhausted by the birth, she sleeps and wakes and then, remem
her husband to administer the sugar water. Perhaps she hopes
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little nothing
that if she pays the baby no mind, the child will simply disappear,
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return to the land of wishes it came from, and that she will wake
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up with only a memory of a vague but unnameable disappoint
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ment that will be forgotten in the daily skirmish of cleaning and
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her crotch will not let her forget. A thing so small ripping her
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wooden spoon when she pees. Returning to her bed, she glances
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too large for her torso, her arms and legs too short. She looks like
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cooking and arguing vegetable prices with market cheats. But
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from front to back so that she has to bite down on the handle of a
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at the baby girl, who is so tiny, so nearly not there. Her head is
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a rag doll sewn together from cast-off parts. Each time Agta
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wakes, it seems possible that the babys existence is just a magi
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would find only newly pulled scallions.
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cians trick, and that if Agta were to look in the basket, she
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My little mouse, Judita, the village wet nurse sings as she
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giant zucchinis. Her brown nipples are so thick that the infant
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smelling skin. Every one of my little mice grows big and strong
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her to suck.
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a haphazardly swept chimney, smells sweetly of infant puke.
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rocks the baby against her bosoms that are long and heavy as
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girl gags each time Judita pushes her small face into her curd-
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and so will you, she commands, shaking the baby in order to get
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Juditas house, a d
irt-f loored room with walls blackened from
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Here, along with three other newborns, the plumbers daughter
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is rotated from the left breast to the right, then into the hands of
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Marisa Silver
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Juditas eldest, Vanda, whose job it is to strip and wipe. The
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gust she feels for these shitting machines that are her daily bur
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sixteen-year-olds expression seesaws between the crinkle of dis

den and the hard fury of hatred she bears toward her mother,
whose body and its uses signal her own utilitarian future. Van
das task complete, she hands the baby off to her younger sister,
Sophia, who diapers the child in sun-starched, wind-smelling
cloth that has just been taken down from the line. It is Toms,
Juditas idiot son, who is in charge of washing the dirty diapers
in a barrel whose water is not changed often enough, a job he has

been given because he performs his mucky task without com
plaint. After the baby is cleaned and freshly attired in diapers
that are much too large for her tiny body, she is placed in a h
ay-
f illed crate, where she dozes and wakes and waits for her turn
onthe line once again. It is as efficient a system as any being

implemented in the new factories in the faraway city where, the
villagers have heard, men in white smocks hold stopwatches and

notebooks and workers are occasionally sucked up into the ma
chines so that who knows what accounts for the brilliant red of
a bolt of cloth? Still, after weeks, when it becomes evident that

even Juditas rich milk, responsible for so many of the villages
pudgy, nonecked boys and girls, will not work miracles on this
tiny, misshapen body, she grows frustrated. By the second month,
her little mouse becomes her little rat; by the third, her little
cockroach, a freakish, thumb-sized enemy determined to bring
down shame on the wet nurse and ruin her business.
Enough! she declares one day. She carries the baby from her
house down the main street, stomping past the corn chandler
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little nothing
and the harness maker and the town gossips with her recalcitrant
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package held out in front of her as if she were returning bad meat
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to the butcher and making sure that everyone in the village can
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smell the proof. She crosses the rickety bridge spanning the river
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tage. There, she finds Agta on her knees in the garden yanking
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eyes grow fearful at the unexpected sight of her child, who shehad
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She stands and backs up a few steps, her pickings shielding her
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that splits the town in two then marches to the plumbers cot
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a clutch of knobby, dirt covered beets from the ground. Agtas
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hoped not to see for at least another month or perhaps ever again.
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useless breasts. But Judita is adamant, and the final payment for
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services is rendered: root vegetables for baby.
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dling the infant awkwardly so that the childs head flops over
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But what am I supposed to do with her? Agta says, cra
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her forearm like a heavy bulb.
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First, Judita says, you could try giving her a name.
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Bronislava means weapon of glory, Rosta, seizer of
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these names that Agta chose for each seed Vclav planted inside
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along with the residue of every miscarriage. The couples imagi
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glorious future for the stubby child they have managed to bring
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glory, Ceslav, honor and glory, and Miroslav, great glory. But
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her over the decades of their attempts were the ones she buried
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nation is dulled by thwarted hope and, unable to project any
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to life, this dwarf child who mocks their years of effort, they can
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only conjure the prosaic. They call the baby Pavla, which means
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Marisa Silver
01
exactly what she is, which is little. She is narrow of body and
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passive and disarmingly intrusive. Although it is impossible, her
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short of limbs. Her eyes are round and watchful, her gaze both
parents cannot help but feel she can see inside their minds and
that she knows their private and sometimes horrible thoughts.
She is an uncomplaining baby, as if she senses any kindness

turned her way is provisional and that she ought not to draw
more attention to herself than is necessary. She remains as quiet
as any item in the cottage, as still as the portrait of dead Teta

Ivana who picked a rose, pricked her finger, and died of infec
tion, as still as the cuckoo clock that is never wound because

Agta and Vclav have no need for timepieces. They feel the pas
sage of the day in their bones, know instinctively when it is the

hour to rise, to eat, to work, to sleep, when to commence the
weekly argument when Agta tells Vclav that he is courting a
terrible fate by refusing to go to Mass, and Vclav tells Agta that
he will not believe that God intends for Father Maty, who asa
boy did questionable things with the back end of a sheep (As did
you! Agta always reminds him. But I grew up to be a plumber!
Vclav replies) to be the conveyer of His word.
Left mostly to her own devices, which, at four months, are
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considerably few, Pavla lies in the wooden crib Vclav bartered
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The slats create the frame through which Pavla watches Agta
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from one of his neighbors in exchange for a cracked commode.
excavate the dark eyes of potatoes with a b

ent-k nuckled knife,
yank stringy, gray tendons from chicken legs, wring out newly
washed laundry, throttling wet sheets and Vclavs undershirts
in her muscular hands, and make the soap that she sells at the
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little nothing
market. Agta heats the rendered cooking fat then mixes it with
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lye that she makes using ashes from the hearth. The blue glass
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bottle in which she stores the poison catches the sunlight and
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Pavlas attention so that the very first object she attempts to
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and stirs, stripping off her sweater, then her apron, then her
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skin drips with sweat, her arms and breasts and stomach shake
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fat or lye or the laborious process of making soap, or that her
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grasp is this ephemeral cobalt sparkle. Then Agta stirs and stirs
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shirt, then her skirt, until she is down to her underclothes. Her
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with her exertions. Of course, Pavla knows nothing of rendered
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mother drops chamomile flowers or rose petals into her molds
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because with this small, inexpensive effort, her soaps can fetch
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isthat her mother is a digger, yanker, wringer, twister, and an
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afew more coins at the market. But what she does understand
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aggressive and sometimes angry stirrer, and so is somewhat re
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moments when the potatoes are boiling and the laundry is hung
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lieved to be left alone. Pavla also observes her mother in the rare
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and there is no fault in the world of her home that she must
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the open window without moving, barely breathing, as if the
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down and she has been left stranded in the incomprehensible
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toavoid the one that is staring at her though the bars of the crib.
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not to her audience but to herself, the sound and memory of the
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immediately attack and remedy. Then Agta will stand next to
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wind that charges her hours and days has unexpectedly died
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seaof her life, suddenly aware that she has no purpose except
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To counter her creeping terror, Agta tells stories. She speaks
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old fairy tales as soothing as the bit of worn, soft chamois cloth
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she carried in her pocket when she was a girl and that she rubbed
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Marisa Silver
01
between her thumb and forefinger when her mother first told
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many years in a small wooden box, intending to pass down the
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her these same stories, the bit of cloth she kept hidden for so
comfort to her own child. But now, this sentiment seems foolish.
Maybe it is even the cause of her heartbreak, because everyone

knows it is bad luck to second-g uess fate.
In the Land of Pranksters there reigned a king...There once lived
a poor, penniless man, truly a pauper...A good many years back it
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must be since the goblin used to dwell on Crow Mountain...and the
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though she cannot yet understand it, will remember all her life:
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story she tells again and again, the one that little Pavla, even
Once there was an old grandfather who went to work in his field.
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When he got there, he saw that an enormous turnip was growing
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ground, so he called his old wife. The man held onto the turnip and his
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there. He pulled and pulled, but he could not yank the turnip out of the
wife held onto him and they pulled and pulled, but still, they could not
pull the turnip from the ground. So they called their little granddaughter. The grandpa held onto the turnip and the grandma held
onto the grandpa and the granddaughter held onto the grandma and
they pulled, but still no luck. And so they called their dog. And the dog
held onto the granddaughter and the granddaughter held onto the
grandmother and the grandmother held onto the grandfather, who
pulled the turnip, but still nothing. And so they called their kitty,
who got in the back of the line and pulled the dog, but the turnip
wouldnt budge. Suddenly, they heard a little voice coming from a hole
in the ground. It was the voice of a mouse. The grandfather said, Oh,
little mouse, you do not have the strength to help us, but the grandmother said, Let her help us if she wants to. So the grandfather held
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little nothing
onto theturnip and the grandmother held onto the grandfather and
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the granddaughter held onto the grandmother and the dog held onto
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thegranddaughter and the kitty held onto the dog and the mouse held
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onto the kitty and they pulled and pulled and pulled and...the tur-
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father, Sometimes the littlest one can be the biggest help.
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the stupidity of the moral. What a ridiculous bunch, she might
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be as tough as an old shoe.
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nip came out of the ground! And the grandmother said to the grand-
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Each time Agta reaches the end of the story, she dismisses
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mutter, or, Anyway, everyone knows that a giant turnip would
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As the hours pass and the light in the room softens and the
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corners recede into shadows, and as she listens to the low drone
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Agta in shadow is somehow the purer distillation of her charac
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of her mothers recitation, Pavla sees both less and more, for
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ter: dark, wary, certain that this world she lives in is not as real as
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rams are more comprehensible to her than the days weather or
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the one she visits in her tales where mountain kings and speaking
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the queer human she has made.
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Oh ho, my wife!
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settles over the village. Agta shakes herself out of her reverie and
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ever is at arms lengtha sock that needs darning, a soup that
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It is evening and twilight gives up its fight, and the night sky
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becomes all energy and spin, engaging importantly with what
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requires spicing, even, because she can no longer ignore the sweet
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stink of baby shit, her daughter. The door of the cottage opens
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Marisa Silver
01
and a dark shape fills it: Pavlas father is home. The tools of his
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moves. This inadvertent music provokes his daughter, who wag
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trade hang off Vclavs thick leather belt and he jangles when he
gles her little arms. When Vclav notices this reaction, he shakes
his hips again, and to his surprise, his daughters eyes grow wide
and her mouth forms its first, wobbly smile. This is the opening
conversation of Pavlas life and she does not want it to end so she
manifests a noise that sounds like the bleating of a goat.
Dont upset her, Agta warns, not wanting to have her ma
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ternal skills put to the test.
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tool belt and dangling it over the crib. Pavla makes her sound
14
his smile unmasking a mouthful of brown and rotted teeth that
11
13
15
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27S
28N
Shes not upset. Shes laughing! Vclav says, taking off his
again and watches as her fathers astonishment turns to pleasure,

emerge from his swollen gums at odd angles like the worn picket
fence that surrounds Agtas garden and fails to keep out the scav
enger deer. Pavla will do anything to keep seeing these teeth and
so she laughs and waves her arms and feels, for the first time in
her life, but not the last, the exquisite pain of love. In a few
years,she will put Vclavs screwdrivers and wrenches and bolts
of all different sizes to use, dressing the long tools in bits of cloth
to make faceless dolls, and stringing washers on twine to fashion

necklaces for her mother. For now, she follows the symphony of
her father as he crosses the room and sits on a hard chair and
waits for his wife to pull off his high boots whose soles are im
pacted with sludge. It is Agtas great shame that the handsome

farrier she married so long ago, the boy who rode the horses he
shod back and forth along the main street supposedly to try out
16
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little nothing
his work but really to show off his powerful thighs to the village
01
maidens, saw advantage in turning his skill with iron and his eye
02
for chance to, of all things, indoor plumbing. Horses will soon
03
be a thing of the past, he explained to Agta, the girl who was
04
in their marriage bed, pushing her knees closer to her face to
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times twice, if theyre lucky.
08
ber pots and being able to study their bodies expulsions for signs
10
most impressed by those powerful flanks, as he lay on top of her
05
improve his angle of entry. But everyone shits once a day. Some
07
The work was slow at first. The villagers were used to cham
09
of good or ill health, and the notion of what was once inside them
11
disappearing before their eyes made them suspicious. Even Agta
12
for a body to eliminate its waste anywhere but in a boilingin
14
refused the improvement, not fully believing that it was possible
13
summer, freezinginwinter, always pungent outhouse. Time
15
and ask Vclav, But where does it go, really? His answer did
17
and again, people would fold their arms and narrow their gazes
16
not satisfy them because even though they talked a good game
18
that idiot, Father Maty, these were realistic people who had
20
time, and who did not fancy the notion of sharing eternity with
22
Now, years later, Agta is the wife of a man who makes a de
24
finally stopped squatting in the fields or pouring their slops out
26
about heaven and hell to keep their children in line and satisfy
19
apretty good idea of where they would end up for the rest of
21
piles of their neighbors crap. But eventually the idea caught on.
23
centliving unclogging the drains and pipes of villagers who have
25
of windows to fertilize their flowers but who have yet to learn
S27
the idiosyncrasies of modern waste disposal. They are forever
N28
17
7/16/16 9:55 AM
Marisa Silver
01
putting allmanner of objects down their toilets as if to bury their
03
purchase, fistfuls of hair cut off to approximate some newfangled
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04
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08
09
secrets. Love letters from mistresses or the bill for a frivolous hat
style advertised in a gazette brought from the city by a peddler,
the gazette itselfall these things and more create odiferous

backups that warp floorboards and stain rugs. His clients regard
plumbing as a sin-exonerating miracle, a daily confession, which
is reasonable given the narrow confines of the indoor WCs that

are built into the corners of rooms or fashioned from stand
10
ingwardrobes, and owing to the contemplative and sometimes
12
Vclavs explanations about the curved and narrow pipes that
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prayerful minutes spent therein. The villagers have no interest in

render their efforts at obfuscation useless. More than useless, as
it turns out, for all it takes for a marriage to crumble is for a

husband to be present when the plumber exhumes a clot of
bloody towels flushed away because a mother of six has decided
a seventh will be the death of her. In fact, Vclav turns out to be

the opposite of what people assume. He is not a man devoted to
the eradication of unmentionable things but one whose very
presence brings them to light. When he enters a house, the own

ers will not look him in the eye, as if he were judge and jury and
taxman all at once. He has taken to demanding his fee up front

because no man pays another to witnesses his humiliation. But
Agta cannot complain. Her husband provides a living for her and
now, she supposes, for the unfortunate issue of her aged womb.
27S
28N
18
7/16/16 9:55 AM
MIKE
LOVE
is a founding member of the Beach Boys,
who began in 1961 and stand as the most
popular American group in history, with
thirteen Gold albums, fifty-five Top 100
singles, and four No. 1 hits. Love continues
as the Beach Boys lead singer and is the
lyricist of their biggest hits. He has received
an Ella Award for his songwriting, and, as
part of the Beach Boys, he is a member of
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; the Vocal
Group Hall of Fame; and has received a
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
JAM E S S. HI R S C H
is a journalist and New York Times bestselling author whose books include
biographies of Willie Mays and Rubin
Hurricane Carter and examinations of
military issues, the health care system, and
global philanthropy. Hirsch won the Christopher Award for Walk in Their Shoes: Can
One Person Change the World?
Front jacket photographs: (top) by Udo Spreitzenbarth;

(bottom) Michael Ochs Archives /Stringer/ Getty Images
Back jacket photographs courtesy of Mike Love and the Love Family
Archive, Capitol Records, Stan Love, and Scott Davis Archives
U.S .A. $28.0 0

CANADA $3 7.0 0
s a founding member of the Beach

Boys, Mike Love has spent an extraordinary
fifty-five years and counting as the groups
lead singer and one of its principal lyricists.
The Beach Boys, from their California roots
to their international fame, are a unique
American storyone of overnight success
and age-defying longevity; of musical genius and reckless self-destruction; of spirituality, betrayal, and forgivenessand Love is
the only band member to be part of it each
and every step of the way. His own story has
never been fully told, and its the story of
how a sheet-metal apprentice became the
quintessential front man for Americas most
successful rock band, singing in more than
5,600 concerts in twenty-six countries.
Love describes the stories behind his
lyrics for pop classics such as Good Vibrations, California Girls, Surfin USA, and
Kokomo, while providing vivid portraits
of the turbulent lives of his three gifted
cousins, Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson.
Loves partnership with Brian has few equals
in American pop music, though Mike has
carved out a legacy of his ownhe cowrote the lyrics to eleven of the twelve
original Beach Boy songs that were Top 10
hits while providing the lead vocals on ten
of them. The bands unprecedented durability also provides a glimpse into Americas
changing cultural mores over the past half
century, while Love himself has experienced
both the diabolical and the divinefrom
Charles Mansons family threatening his
life to Maharishi instilling it with peace. A
husband, a father, and an avid environmentalist, Love has written a book that is as rich
and layered as the Beach Boy harmonies
themselves.

1609
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GOOD VIBRATIONS
MY LIFE AS A BEACH BOY
MIKE LOVE
9780399176418_Vibrations_TX_pi-x_1-438.indd v
WITH JAMES S. HIRSCH
7/20/16 7:31 AM

375 Hudson Street
Copyright 2016 by Meleco, LLC

or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers
and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Blue Rider Press is a registered trademark and its colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC
Names: Love, Mike, 1941- author.
Title: Good vibrations : my life as a Beach Boy / Mike Love.
Description: New York : Blue Rider Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016026426 | ISBN 9780399176418 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Love, Mike, 1941- | Rock musiciansUnited StatesBiography. | Beach Boys.
Classification: LCC ML420.L8855 A3 2016 | DDC 782.42166092 [B] dc23
1
10

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer
this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the authors alone.
9780399176418_Vibrations_TX_pi-x_1-438.indd vi
7/20/16 7:31 AM
CHAPTER 1
CALIFORNIA IS
THE ULTIMATE
rowing up in Southern California, I loved watching the sun descend across the calm waters of the Pacific. I infused its disappearance with something cosmic and mystical. Darkness fell.
The earth spun. And then dawn broke, bringing light and renewal
to all.
Ive tried to maintain that attitude in all aspects of lifeto recall the warmth of the sun even on the coldest of nights. My approach
toward music bore that out. As a member of the Beach Boys, I was
the one most apt to find the positives, the silver lining, even in moments of despair. My parents were responsible for that. They gave me
every reason to be hopeful.
My moms side of the family came from the dry prairies of Kansas, while my dads forebears arrived from the cotton fields of Louisiana. All my ancestors, poor and desperate, were lured westward by
the promise of a better life: flowers in bloom, lush farmland, green
mountains, clean beaches, warm sunshine, jobs in oil, agriculture,
and constructionSouthern California in the first quarter of the
twentieth century. This image rightfully endured for the next fifty
years, hallowed in The Grapes of Wrath, memorialized on film, pro-
9780399176418_Vibrations_TX_pi-x_1-438.indd 1
7/20/16 7:31 AM
MIKE LOVE
moted on radio and in popular music. That image lingers to this day.
Southern California was and still is a land where the American dream
can become a reality. Yes, those words are a clich, and its easy to ridicule the California myth: from the Spanish settlers to the gold hunters to the Okies, all migrating to what was once known as the maana
country, the country of tomorrow. But to me it wasnt a mythI
saw how much could be achieved in one generation. The big house.
The fancy cars. The nice vacations. All of it, plus newfound respect.
Make no mistake, I wasnt raised at Disneyland. I also saw hard
times and understood how ephemeral, how random, success could
be, and those experiences shaped my life as well. I knew that the
streets of California were not paved with gold, but Ive gone through
my life believing that if you had the imagination, the ability, and
the work ethic, you might find the beaches sprinkled with some
gold dust.
It was a fine omen that my mothers first residence in California
was a beach.
Born in Hutchinson, Kansas, in 1919, Emily Wilson was named
after her mothers favorite sister. But as the story goes, on the night she
was born, her mother attended an opera featuring Glee Starr, so she
gave her newborn the middle name Glee. That story must have been
true, as it prefigured her lifelong devotion to the opera, and Glee became the name by which she was known.
My moms father, Coral Buddy Wilson, was a plumber, volatile
and restless, who traveled far beyond his Kansas roots seeking work
at Army camps in the Southwest while also visiting California in
search of his own fortune. My moms mother, Edith, was Swedish
(I take pride in knowing that I come from a long line of Swedish
pacifists). She was born on a farm and had to quit school to help her
family plant potatoes. Marriage didnt rescue her from poverty, however. With her husband often gone, Edith was left in Hutchinson to
take care of her young family, and Glee, her fourth child, and her
2
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GOOD VIBRATIONS
older brother, Murry, were briefly sent to live with their second cousins. Then in 1924, Buddy sent Edith a telegram, $200, and instructions to take a train to California. Glee was too young to remember
the trip, but her mom later told her how kind the other passengers
werethey pitied her, traveling with five children, and they would
bring food for all of them. The Wilsons settled in an oceanside
hamlet called Cardiff-by-the-Sea, but unable to find a landlord who
would rent them a room, they pitched a tent on a windswept beach
and lived there for nine weeks. That sounds harsh, but the complete
novelty of the ocean provided its own variety of excitement. The
family finally rented an apartment in Pasadena and eventually a
small house in Inglewood, southwest of downtown Los Angeles.
Buddy and Edith had nine children, though one died in infancy.
Buddy eked out a living working in the Huntington Beach oil fields
and later as a freelance plumber. Suffering chronic allergies and sinus
problems, he sought relief by traveling to the desert, which further
isolated him from his family. (When I was a boy, my grandfather
joined us for dinner and used an empty Campbells soup can as a
spittoon.) His temper often got the better of him, as did the alcohol.
He never did strike it rich in California and, betrayed by his own illusions, became abusive, lashing out at his wife but saving his severest
whippings for his four sons. One of them, Charles, was once beaten
so relentlessly that his older brother, Murry, had to yank Buddy off
the boy and temporarily lock the enraged patriarch outside his own
house. Murry frequently came to blows with his father, at times to
protect his siblings. But Murry also inherited his fathers paranoid,
combustible wrath, which he carried into the parenting of his own
three sons: Brian, Dennis, and Carl. My mom despised her father for
his savage treatment of his own family and his derelictions as provider and protector, and her childhood left her with feelings of insecurity, anxiety, and even abandonment. She battled these fears for the
rest of her life. She did, however, have a sturdy role model in her own
3
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MIKE LOVE
mother. In addition to raising eight children, Edith brought in extra

income by taking in washing and eventually worked as a presser for a
garment manufacturer. She lived with us when I was in junior high
school, a heavyset woman who was tender but tough and baked killer
cinnamon rolls and butterscotch pies. After she was diagnosed with
breast cancer, she prepared for surgery by taking long swims every
morning in the Pacific, the same body of water that served as the
adventuresome gateway for her homeless young family upon reaching
California. After her mastectomy, she showed me the gruesome scar
as a badge of survival.
Dont complain, was her message. Life on the frontier has always
been tough.
I dont recall ever seeing my maternal grandparents together. I
just assumed that at some point, my grandfather left and never returned. When Grandma Wilson died in 1963, my mother blamed
my grandfather for driving her to an early grave, and my mom wanted
no part of him either. Edith Wilson had indeed died youngshe was
sixty-sixbut her legacy was significant. She had dreams of her own
of being a concert pianist. Though that never happened, she passed
her appreciation of the arts to her children, including my mom. Edith
sang to little Glee in the kitchen while preparing meals, and Glee
would fall asleep listening to her mom play the piano while her aunts
and uncles harmonized.
Glee Wilson had many talents. Lean and athletic, she danced
ballet and tap, and she was a star pitcher on her Washington High
School softball team. She could walk upstairs on her hands, a skill
she learned from an eccentric uncle. She later took up tennis and
water-skiing as well as golf; her instructors encouraged her to go pro,
but she opted for music, her greatest love. She sang alto in a high
school chorus and was part of a trio that sang Madama Butterfly and
performed on KFWB in Los Angeles; she was always proud that a
high school teacher gave up her lunch hour to coach them. My mom
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GOOD VIBRATIONS
had the ability as well as the desire to pursue a singing career, but she
was also bound by the conventions of her time. In high school, she
met the man of her dreams, a rawboned football player of English
Scottish lineage, and her life took a more traditional path.
My fathers side of the family also looked to California as their
Eden. My paternal grandfather, Edward Felton Love, born in 1894,
grew up in Plain Dealing, Louisiana, a speck of a town between
Shreveport and the Arkansas border that once served as a trading
post for antebellum cotton plantations. After the Civil War, our family sawmill provided the lumber to rebuild what had been destroyed
by the Union Army. The Reconstruction Eraand the liberation of
the slavesdid not come easily to these parts. The sawmill provided
the wooden planks for the building that hosted the Knights of the
White Camellia, a white supremacist group.
Edwards mom died when he was a baby, and not much is known
about his childhood, except the poverty. He often didnt have shoes,
forcing him to drag the logs to the mill barefoot. He moved to Los
Angeles in 1909 and found work at a sheet metal shop. Though he
had only a fifth-grade education, he soon started his own business,
Love Sheet Metal Company, which initially served restaurants but
expanded to Army camps and recruitment centers in need of largescale kitchen facilities and custom appliances. In 1916, Edward married a neighbor, seventeen-year-old Edith Clardy (she was born on an
orange ranch), and their son, Milton, was born the following year.
They lived in a new house so remote that Milt was awakened on Sunday mornings by rifle shots of locals hunting rabbits.
While the Great Depression ravaged many businesses, Love Sheet
Metal survived on its government contracts with the Army and with
public universities, and this gave Milt a stable childhood. He tooled
around town in a Ford Model A, hanging out at Chili Bowl outlets
while earning extra money picking beans in fields that would become
the runways of Los Angeles International Airport. He also discov5
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MIKE LOVE
ered the virtues of government work with the Civilian Conservation

Corps in a fire-suppression crew near Pasadena.
Milt found love early at Washington High School in the slim figure of Glee Wilson, who at fifteen was two years his junior. They
were a striking couplehe six-foot-three, red hair, princely and athletic; she five-foot-seven, blond hair and high cheekbones, a Nordic
beauty. They dated for four years, often dancing to Benny Goodman
at the Palomar Ballroom, and in 1938 they wanted to marry. But the
families were opposedthe first of many rifts between the Loves and
the Wilsonsand their poverty complicated matters. Even a small
wedding would have been a financial stretch. Glees parents couldnt
afford a traditional dress, though my mom later noted, pointedly,
that she was entitled to wear white. So the couple eloped, a move
both daring and romantic, my moms only regret being that she always wondered what she would have looked like in a wedding gown.
The timing of the marriage could not have been better, as Love
Sheet Metalfor which Milt as well as his brother Stan now worked,
with their father still in chargewas about to take off.
During World War II, the company manufactured galley equipment for Navy ships while experiencing greater demand for their
kitchen hardware. In the mid-1940s, my grandfather moved the company south of downtown Los Angeles to 3301 East Fourteenth Street,
employed more than a hundred skilled laborers, and added a paint
and wood shop. Even after the war ended, demand for the companys
products was strong as California became the destination for growing
numbers of Americans. Between 1940 and 1960, the states population surged by 128 percent, to 15.7 million people. I dont recall
anyone talking about smog in my youth. It was a time when new
highways connected pristine subdivisions, mass production created
millionaires, and a building boom of schools, hospitals, and restaurants as well as homes rippled across the Los Angeles region. Love
Sheet Metal could barely keep up: a massive kitchen for the UCLA
6
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GOOD VIBRATIONS
Medical Center, custom laboratory tables for junior colleges, impeccable sinks for tony restaurants in Hollywood.
All of a sudden, after so many bleak years, the Loves were rich. It
was almost too much to fathom, but it affirmed Grandpa Loves faith
in his decision to come to this state of vineyards, citrus, and endless
shorelines. As he used to tell me, California is the ultimate.
fter my parents married, they bought a two-bedroom home in Inglewood for $7,500. (They borrowed $1,000 from my grandfather,
who later waived the debt.) I was their first child, born March 15,
1941, with my sister Maureen born two years laterour mom subsequently noted that she was in her Irish phase, giving her first two
children M names. Stephen was born four years later. Our house was
too small, so with cash on hand, my parents looked for a residence
befitting their new station in life.
They visited no fewer than thirty homes until they found one in
Baldwin Hills in West Los Angeles. The hills themselves are a low
mountain range with active oil wells and a grand Spanish heritage.
One neighborhood of winding roads is called the Dons, with such
street names as Don Luis and Don Felipe, and I attended Dorsey
High School, whose teams were known as the Dons.
In slick promotional brochures or glossy travel magazines, the
California dream was often expressed through the glory of ones
home, and my parents found a residence that qualified. It was on the
corner of Mount Vernon and Fairway, purchased in 1948 for $40,000.
With doctors and dentists up and down the streets, the neighborhood was nicknamed Pill Hill, but I dont think any of the other
houses had quite the history, or worldly touches, as ours. It was built
by a USC professor and his wealthy wife who wanted accoutrements
from around the globe. So off they went on a three-month journey,
sending back dark red tile from Italy, a stained glass window from
7
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MIKE LOVE
Jerusalem, and magnificent stones from God knows where for five
different fireplaces. The house had three floors, fourteen rooms, five
bathrooms, and amenities of all kinds. The plush red carpet caressed
your feet. The chandelier cast a soft glow over the living room. The
swimming pool beckoned. We had a winding staircase, a subterranean garage, and a rear sun deck, from which I would watch the
Fourth of July fireworks set off from the Los Angeles Coliseum or get
a clear view of the snow-covered San Gabriel Mountains. My parents
never took it for granteda graceful, Mediterranean-style palace
that reflected the aspirations of an entire region.
We needed every square inch of the house because our family continued to grow. After Stephen came Stanley and then Stephaniemy
mom was now in her sibilant phase, with Stephanie having the added
benefit, according to my mom, of sounding kind of French. Portraits
of all the kids soon hung along the staircase. With our blond or reddish hair, blue eyes, and rangy frames, we fit right in as homegrown
California WASPs. My dad, the stoic provider, woke up at five each
morning and frequently worked the weekends making boat trailers. I
made the connection between his sacrifices and our current bounty.
Love Sheet Metal was so strong that each year my grandfather bought
two Cadillacs, with their wraparound windshields and wire wheels,
and he gave one to my dad and one to my uncle. For a while in the
1950s, we drove a different luxury car every year.
Much to our embarrassment, my mom dressed us in identical
denim clothes or matching sailor outfits, including the captain hats,
and she took us to Fosters Freeze (whose mascot was an ice cream
cone wearing a chefs hat) or, for special occasions, Joe Petrellis Famous Steakhouse (sirloins $3.65). Parts of my childhood came right
out of a 1950s tableau. One Sunday afternoon, my parents took us
to Clydes Corner, a hamburger place in Inglewood, and we saw
Pat Boone, who was already a singing star and whoto my moms
7/20/16 7:31 AM
GOOD VIBRATIONS
delightstopped to talk to us. He and his wife, he told us, had just
come back from church.
My parents bought a trailer that slept seven and had a shower, and
we once drove north to Banff National Park in Canada and stayed at
Chateau Lake Louise. Wed eat dinner in an elegant dining room and
then go to another room for a recital given by a soloist or ensemble.
The kids preferred the room service, chocolate malts for all. Our parents also wanted us to appreciate natures beautythe powder-blue
color of the lake, the Oregon coast on a cold, overcast day. Those
impressions indeed stayed with me. We also made frequent trips to
Estero Beach, south of the Mexican border, and spent long weekends
wading into the clear surf, catching dorado and yellowtail and preparing them ourselves. One time on the beach, a young soldado with his
guitar came along on his horse and sang for a few cigarettes. He had a
beautiful voice, sounding very much like the Mexican-American baritone Andy Russell, whose bilingual style had become all the rage. I
was interested in the cute Mexican girls but also in the different language and culture, an early sign of my fascination with ethnicity of
any kind. When a shabbily dressed Mexican trio with guitars sang for
tips in a restaurant, I added an extra part to their harmonies.
I was closer to my paternal grandparents than to my own mom
and dad, and I often stayed at their home in nearby Arcadia. Grandma
Love was classy, educated, and keenly interested in astrology, an interest that she passed on to me. Grandpa Love was the taciturn patriarch whose tough, powerful hands testified to a lifetime of hauling
logs and bending metal. His great passion was gambling. Each day at
lunchtime at Love Sheet Metal, he converted a worktable for craps.
He also had a gambling room in his own homewith roulette, craps,
poker, even a slot machineand he taught me to be a croupier.
Ive always been competitive, a reflection of the home in which I
was raised. My siblings and I often battled one another, never in a
7/20/16 7:31 AM
MIKE LOVE
mean-spirited way, though one time my mom started to call the police to break up a fight between Stephen and Stan. (They stopped as
soon as they heard her voice on the phone.) We were all athletes, including my sisters. Maureen excelled at tetherball, Ping-Pong, and
tennis, while Stephanieperhaps the most combative in the group
broke her leg sliding into second base. Stephanie also had a beautiful
soprano, which reminded my mom of her own mothers voice. Stephen was a football star in high school but was also the most academically driven, his sharp mind evident early on. When he was four
years old, I taught him the different car models, and he would sit
on our front stoop and yell them out as each car drove by: Chevy!
Cadillac! Dodge!
We loved pulling pranks on one another, particularly the brothers. Stan, for example, was two years younger than Stephen, but his
height, even at a young age, made him stand out. When he was five
years old, Stephen and I told Stan that he was tall because he was
adopted, and he believed us. (We tried to enlist Maureen in our
scheme, but she wasnt devious enough.) Stan ran out onto the front
steps and started crying. Stephen and I followed.
Dont worry, Stan, Stephen said. Ill help you look for your
parents.
No way, I said. Theyre long gone by now.
My mom later recalled that we convinced Stan of his adopted
state for two years. I dont believe it was that long, but I dont think
Stan ever forgave us.
Regardless, Stan grew to be six-foot-eight and put his height to
good use, starring in basketball at the University of Oregon and then
playing in the NBA.
My mom encouraged all of us to play sports, but she believed her
primary parental mission was to instill the arts into all of her children, my dad her partner in this task. They required my siblings and
10
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me to take lessons in music and oil painting; and Maureen, who felt
the greatest connection to her faith, painted a large portrait of Jesus
when she was in high school. My dad had a darkroom in the basement, took thousands of pictures, and taught us photography. Stan
became his most avid protg and took countless Beach Boy photos
over the years. My dad was an artist as well. Driving into the countryside, he would set up an easel and paint barns or landscapes.
My mom liked to say, I feel so sorry for people who dont enjoy
music, and even as adults, my parents wanted to grow musically, with
my dad taking cello lessons and my mom, piano. But it was my moms
passion that ran deepest. She sang in a professional chorus, which performed for church groups and womens clubs, but she savored opera
the most. It had voice, drama, orchestration, and occasionally ballet.
A member of the Opera Reading Club of Hollywood, she would go to
the famous Graumans Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard
and hear an opera sung in English, though she much preferred to hear
it at the Met in its proper Italian. Her four years of Latin in high
school helped her read the librettos. My mom did housework to symphonies, concertos, and operas, which she spun on the hi-fi. To wake
us in the morning, she rattled the chandelier with Enrico Carusos
rendition of Vesti la giubba, Giuseppe Verdis Requiem, Maria Callas, and the Mozart Requiem Mass sung by the Roger Wagner Chorale.
One day, a neighbor walked up the hill to our house and said a
dying woman a block away could hear the music and asked if my
mom would turn it down. My mom thought that was the perfect
way to go.
was ten years old when my mother used the house for her first musical, inviting over about a hundred people for a sing-along. Nowadays, inviting such a number is no big deal, with email and evites, but
11
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MIKE LOVE
back then it required calling each person on the phone, and my mom
allocated three weeks to the task. She bought sheet music for the participants, who were grouped by tenors, sopranos, altos, and basses,
and the woman who led their high school music department was recruited to conduct them. They sang Some Enchanted Evening and
Bali Hai while using our Hammond organ and Steinway grand
piano to play classical numbers and boogie-woogie. It was the first of
many home musicals, with the kids confined to the second floor but
able to hear every note. My mom also invited the ladies over for fund
raisers and tea parties, in which she would tap-dance, and the attendees became part of my moms glee club.
Musically, it was inevitable that my siblings and I would be influenced by what we saw and heard; the only question was how.
At one recital my parents hired a harpist, which enchanted Maureen. She loved the instruments physical beauty and its delicate, mellow tone, and her fascination deepened when she attended a harp
recital. That Christmas, my parents bought her a $7,000 Lyon &
Healy harp, which would be more than $61,000 today. On Maureens first day she figured out the right hand to Silent Night. She
was nine years old. My dad carried that harp to so many of Maureens practices and concerts that my mom joked he lost an inch in
height.
As for me, I didnt really love my parents music, but the atmosphere made a lasting impression. I had a very clear idea that the
music was not just about the music. It was about entertainment. It
was about bringing together friends to sing and to laugh and to set
aside the problems of the outside world.
The first number I ever sang was That Old Black Magic, when
I was two years old. According to my mom, she taught it to me while
I was being potty trained, which was an odd bit of multitasking,
but I cant argue with any of the results. I apparently sang this Glenn
Miller standard, with considerable aplomb, for adults who stopped by
12
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GOOD VIBRATIONS
the house. In time, I also played some clarinet and sang in a glee club,
but my most important music lessons came from nature.
I went to 54th Street Elementary School, and on my way home
I walked along a small wooded ravine, where chickens roamed, and I
flustered them by crowing like a rooster. I listened to the birds
mockingbirds, starlings, redwing blackbirdsand tried to mimic
their song. The melodious whistles and harsh rasps. The warbling
harmonies and abrupt trills. The scolding chak chak chaks. They were
all singing to one another, just like humans, flirting and preening
and boasting, and I tried to fit my voice right into theirs.
Environmentalism, I think, was just part of the community. I attended Audubon Junior High School, which included a field trip to
the Audubon Society. A grade school teacher had a stack of National
Geographic magazines, which I devoured for stories about the wildlife, the oceans, the planet. Another teacher wrote a book called Gifts
of the Forest, which she shared with us. Insects intrigued me, none
more than the monarch butterfly. With its black-and-gold wings that
resembled stained glass windows, it is considered the most beautiful
of all butterflies, and they flew around the eucalyptus trees in our
backyard. I had a good friend, Thomas Emmel, who shared my passion for this delicate creature, and we spent afternoons chasing the
graceful monarchs with a net, catching them when possible, and setting them free. We read about their remarkable life cycles: how they
would lay their eggs on the leaves, hatch into larvae, go into the cocoon stage, and emerge as butterflies. And then it was all over. The
adult monarchs live only a few weeks, giving us a bracing lesson on
the fragility of life.
My sensitivity to the rhythms of the earth never left me and would
influence some of my future music, but Tom Emmel turned his interest in butterflies into a distinguished career as an educator, author,
and conservationist. Our paths would cross again, much later in life,
as he would reconnect me to the miracle of the monarch.
13
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MIKE LOVE
Ive always been a dedicated reader and loved literature and languages. As a kid, I bought a newspaper called Elijah Speaks, about
Elijah Muhammad, because I was curious about Black Muslims. In
junior high school, my friend Craig Owens and I did a buddy report on Adolf Hitler, which required us to read Mein Kampf as well
as other books on the Nazis. We did extensive research, and it had a
major impact on me. It was the first time I had ever thought seriously
about mans inhumanity to man, and I had some sense that our conventional institutionspolitical, religious, socialwere no match
against our most violent instincts. These were troublesome and powerful thoughts in the mind of an eighth grader, but in one form or
the other they would stay with me for many years to come.
We received an A+ on the project, and I knew that I was one of
the best-read students in my classmy mom once received a call
from my sixth-grade teacher reprimanding me for reading when I
should have been doing some other assignment. I got good grades in
literature, history, and social studies but didnt apply myself in science and math. I also had a rebel streak and gave some of my teachers
fits. At Dorsey High School, one of my instructors spoke with an
affected air, and one day when he was blathering on about his trip to
the Netherlands, I helpfully suggested to my classmates that he had
visited a whorehouse. The remark landed me in the vice principals
office, for neither the first nor last time.
Dorsey, in the late 1950s, retained the defined sexual roles of the
era: the boys fielded most of the sports teams while the girls populated
the clubs for Welfare, Hospitality, and Hostess. But in a highly
segregated region, state, and country, Dorsey was a racially mixed
stew that I found appealing. The school had African-Americans, Jews,
and Japanese, as well as Protestants and Catholics (we were Lutheran),
and I enjoyed the mix of languages and cultures. To show my solidarity with my Jewish friends, I skipped school on Rosh Hashanah and
14
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GOOD VIBRATIONS
Yom Kippur. I learned to speak some Spanish, Japanese, and Yiddish.

The Japanese kids taught me their alphabet and clever wordplays. For
example, ku means nine, ichi means one, and ju is ten: ku + ichi = ju.
So the Japanese students referred to the Jewish kids as ku-ichi.
By high school, I was six feet tall and had long legs, well suited for
long distances, so I ran track and cross-country and was captain of
the latter team, which was part of the Southern League of the Los
Angeles City School System. Craig Owens would come to my house
early in the morning, and wed run five miles before school. I never
had the kind of athletic talent that my brother Stan had, but when it
came to a meet, I dont recall anyone on my high school cross-country
team beating me.
Running track meant that I spent a lot of time with the black
kids, and that had a profound musical influence. A couple of my
track teammates, Paul Denkins and Frank Mayfield, sang R&B in
the shower. With the backbeat of pounding water and the steam
swirling above, they belted out some of the funkiest blues Id ever
heard, like Jimmy Reeds Baby What You Want Me to Do, and
Sick and Tired (by Dave Bartholomew, Christopher Kenner, and
Fats Domino), in which the early-to-rise narrator is sick and tired of
foolin around with his layabout lover.
It was soul-stirring, primordial shit, something that transcended racial or ethnic groups. I loved it, and it further opened my eyes and ears
to a very different world.
I grew up in a conventionally bigoted household, but bigoted
nonetheless. My parents didnt want me to hang out with Catholics
or Jews or Asians, let alone blacks, and my father didnt even want to
see blacks on TV. I defied those edicts, not to strike a blow for social
justice but because the off-limit groups were too cool to ignore. Most
of the black kids had moved here from the Deep South, bringing
with them their own style, vernacular, and prejudices. I learned that
15
7/20/16 7:31 AM
MIKE LOVE
dark-skinned blacks were looked down upon by their lighter-skinned

counterparts, and straight hair was more coveted than kinky.
But it was the language that captivated me. Even their caustic
profanities had a lyrical quality. One guy would mockingly say, Im
gonna do you in. Their emphasis on do you in found its way into the
first two lines of Help Me, Rhonda:
Well since she put me down
Ive been out doin in my head.
I got along with the black kids, in part because I was good at
sports but also because I spoke their own windy slang and could
trade verbal or actual blows. One time at lunch, several black guys
started complaining rather heatedly that Elvis, Pat Boone, and Jerry
Lee Lewis had become famous by playing music that wasnt really
theirs.
The white man stole the black mans music! one guy yelled at me.
He had a point, but I wasnt about to give in.
Hey, man, I said. Aint no nigger ever invented no guitar!
They laughed. I could use that language because they knew I had
some appreciationindeed, affectionfor who they were and what
they were all about. Some of my teachers also recognized that I could
cross these racial boundaries. In my junior year, a Filipino student
was shot and killed as a bystander in a gang-related incident. Our
English class was allowed to send one student to the funeral, and our
teacher asked me to be its representative. In a more positive example,
Dorsey High School played host to a visit by President Sukarno of
Indonesia. Dorsey was chosen as a fine example of Americas melting
pot, and I was asked to escort the presidents son around for the day.
I think Ive always known how to get along with different people
from different backgrounds, and my parents were proud of these
honors as evidence of the manners they had taught me.
16
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GOOD VIBRATIONS
hough my childhood was touched by the California ideal, I didnt

live in a bubble. Mine was also a gritty, discordant youth, which
shaped my life in equally important ways. I didnt have a lot of close
friends or maybe just didnt let many people get close to me. I was
more comfortable as a renegade, sometimes expressed through harmless sibling high jinks, but a few pranks were more serious. I liked to
play with matches and once lit one of our mattresses on fire. Smoke
filled the bedroom, and a fire engine was summoned. (Notwithstanding a charred mattress, no harm came to property or person.)
I took risks outside the home as well. I mixed together my own
gunpowder, constructed a small cannon, and shot it in the backyard.
I once took small explosive caps, wrapped them around the tracks
used by streetcars, and then stepped back and watched the show as
the passing cars triggered the explosives. No one got hurt, but it got
peoples attention. I liked to flaunt a tough-guy image, so at Dorsey I
played the penny stomp, in which the bigger kids threw coins to
the ground and dared others to pick them up without getting their
hands stomped. I got scuffed and bloodied but never backed down.
Some kids threw down dimes to get more bodies colliding with one
another, a quarter drawing even heavier blows. One rich kid would
toss in a fifty-cent piece just to trigger a near riot.
To stay eligible for sports, I took summer classes at Manual Arts
High School in South Los Angeles. It was a mostly black school, and
visiting white students were not particularly welcome, some having
been taken away in ambulances after encounters with hoodlums.
They drove lowriding cars and were plain frightening. The National
Guard in Arkansas had recently protected black students who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, and I was thinking,
Where is my National Guard?
I hung out with some black guys from our football team who were
17
7/20/16 7:31 AM
MIKE LOVE
taking classes for the same reason I was, and they provided protection. But I also kept in my pocket a stiletto and brass knuckles as well
as some half-pint liquor bottles. Once in chemistry, I sold shots of
tequila for a nickel, and on another day in American literature, a kid
next to me pulled out his switchblade to trim his nails, and I asked
him where he got it.
Pawnshop, he said.
I pulled out the lean handle of my stiletto, pressed a button on the
side, and out shot the gleaming, straight blade. I started working on
my nails.
Hey, he said, whered you get that?
Mexico.
Okay. Cool.
One day in chemistry, a guy told me, Best not go down to the
head today.
Why not?
Because there are some bad dudes there smoking pot.
I promptly asked to go to the bathroom, and when I got there, I
saw the black guys in bandannas smoking joints. I went into a stall,
took out three cherry bombs, lit them, and ran like hell, with the
three guys hightailing right behind. I was in my seat when the bombs
exploded.
Hey, Love, whatd you do? the guy asked me.
Blew up the head, man.
I sent the message: Dont mess with Love. He appears to be crazy.
Well, I wasnt crazy, but I had these two different people inside
me. I was the guy who loved to mimic the songbirds in a pleasant
voice, and I was the guy who loved to rattle the hoods with cherry
bombs. I was a peacenik and a badass. A butterfly and a switchblade.
Tensions rose at home as well. My mom was overprotective, and I
bore the brunt of her insecurities. She wouldnt let me join the Boy
Scouts because she feared Id fall off a cliff, and she tried to deter me
18
7/20/16 7:31 AM
GOOD VIBRATIONS
from running cross-country because she thought Id collapse. Upon

seeing me complete a race, she told my dad, My God, he looks
forty. I was seventeen. In the mid-1970s, my mom wrote an unpublished memoir, which is sprinkled with near-disaster storiesone
child almost dies in a lake, another nearly falls out a window, another
almost loses an eye in a baseball accident. She lived in the shadow of
her own chaotic youth, with a tyrannical father and eight kids running wild, and she wanted something very different for her children.
When I was young, she wrote, I thought I would put all my
energies into raising children who were going to be perfect. I had
given up all the things I personally wanted to do and would be the
best mother in the world.
She was forty years old when her last child, Marjorie, was born in
1960a nineteen-year age difference between her oldest (me) and
her youngest. She now had three sons and three daughters, three children whose first name began with an S, and three with an M. Marjorie was indeed a gift, a sweet, wholesome girl who also developed a
passion for the harp. When she was a teenager, my two brothers and
I bought her a station wagon so she could carry the instrument
around. One time when Maureen couldnt perform at a wedding, she
asked Marjorie to fill in for her. Because it was an outdoor wedding,
overlooking the ocean, my mom feared that the strings would stretch
in the dampness, but the harp emerged unscathed.
Those kinds of doubts, of premonitions, unnerved my mom, and
the stress of raising six perfect children could overwhelm her. She
sometimes got into the cooking sherry and suffered fits of depression
and melodrama. Im dying, she would tell us. Im dying. She was
emotive but, at least for me, not always emotionally available, and the
distance between us grew with the birth of each child. Part of that
distance was inevitable, as she had to tend to her growing brood, but
I dont believe either of us knew how to navigate a household that
had experienced so much change and disruption.
19
7/20/16 7:31 AM
MIKE LOVE
Pressures also mounted on my dad. Unknown to any of us, Love

Sheet Metal began to struggle in the late 1950s, when the big contracts dwindled, the economy fell into a recession, and the fading
Eisenhower administration was unable to revive it. Clients were unhappy. There were suits and countersuits. We had spent beyond our
means. My dad, always grimly determined about his work, never
shared the difficulties with us, but he also wanted no grief when he
got home. One night he lost his temper and threw the hi-fi against
the wall, making a dent. Other times he used his belt, though never
to hurt us. Hell, sometimes we deserved to be smacked, and it did get
our attention. He preferred sarcasm, a bonding rite among the males
in the family. My father, brothers, and I sat at the dinner table and
had chop sessions, in which the goal was to use humor to mock or
belittle. We thought ourselves smart and funny, and Ill always appreciate the clever insult or the stinging retort. But I now know that my
mom and sisters often found our chop sessions hurtful and divisive.
Our name was Love, but the word itself, spoken between parents
and children, was mostly absent in our house. Nor were my parents
natural huggers. My dad viewed the open display of any emotion as a
sign of weakness. He once fell down our circular staircase, tumbling
to the bottom. Fearing the worst, Maureen ran over and asked him if
he was okay. Yes was all he said. He wasnt okay, but he wouldnt
acknowledge otherwise. He had to be strong for the children.
20
7/20/16 7:31 AM
5.25 7.75 SPINE: 0.96
U. S.A. $23.00
CA NA DA $30.00
Willie Nelsons inspiring

Christmas fable,
based on his holiday classic
Pretty Paper.
W I L L I E N E L S O N is an American
country music singer-songwriter, as well
as a poet, actor, and activist. He is also
the author of six previous books. Nelson
was inducted into the Country Music
Hall of Fame in 1993.
D AV I D R I T Z coauthored Nelsons
memoir, Its a Long Story, and has
collaborated with everyone from Ray
Charles to Don Rickles.
More than fifty years ago, Willie Nelsons

beloved Christmas song Pretty Paper
first hit the airwaves. And for all these years,
Willie has wondered about the reallife Texas street vendor, selling wrappings
and ribbons, who inspired his song.
Who was this poor soul? What did his
painful trials say about our loves, our
hopes, our dreams in this holiday season
Jacket design and illustration

by Marc Burckhardt
and in the rest of our lives?

ISBN 978-0-7352-1154-4
5 2 3 0 0
ITS THE EARLY SIXTIES

and Willie Nelson is down-andout, barely eking out a living as a singersongwriter. The week before Christmas,
he spots a legless man on a cart, selling
wares in front of Leonards department
store in Fort Worth, Texas. The humble
figure, by the name of Vernon Clay, piques
Willies curiosity, but Vernon is stubbornly
private anddespite Willies charming
querieshas no interest in telling his
story. Willie is tenacious, though, and he
eventually learns that Vernon is a fellow
musician, a fine guitarist and singer.
When Vernon disappears, he leaves
behind only a diary, which tells an epic tale
of life-altering tragedies, broken hearts,
and crooked record men, not to mention
backroad honky-tonks, down-home cooking, and country songwriting genius.
Deeply moved and spurred on by Vernons pages, Willie aims to give the man
one last shot at redemption and a chance
to embody the holiday spirit.
A N I MP R I N T O F P E N G U I N R A N D O M HO U S E
V I S I T U S AT B LU E RI D E R P R E S S.C O M
16 10
9
9780735211544_PrettyPaper_JK.indd 1
780735 211544
8/24/16 5:31 PM
Pretty
Pa p e r
A C H R I S T M A S TA L E
Q
WIL L IE NEL S O N
W I TH DAVI D R IT Z
BLUE RIDER PR E S S
NEW YORK
9780735211544_Pretty_TX_pi-xiv_1-290.indd vii
8/26/16 11:13 AM

375 Hudson Street
Copyright 2016 by Willie Nelson

laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form
without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin
to continue to publish books for every reader.
Lyrics to Pretty Paper, written by Willie Nelson, 1962 Sony/ATV Tree
Publishing. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC,
424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219. All rights reserved.
Used by permission.
Names: Nelson, Willie, author. | Ritz, David, author.
Title: Pretty paper / Willie Nelson with David Ritz.
Description: New York : Blue Rider Press, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016029220 | ISBN 9780735211544 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Christmas stories. | BISAC: MUSIC / Genres & Styles /
Country & Bluegrass. | RELIGION / Holidays / Christmas & Advent. | GSAFD:
Autobiographical fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3614.E44957 P74 2016 | DDC 813/.6dc23
p.
cm.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Illustrations by Matthew Broughton
9780735211544_Pretty_TX_pi-xiv_1-290.indd viii
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H A P P Y H O L I DAY S
t was a rough Christmas in a rough town. Back in

the early 1960s, Fort Worth was still the Wild
West. There was no shortage of honky-tonks. The city

was a haven for hustlers whod mastered the art of
living outside the law. Gangsters controlled the bookie
joints, the brothels and most of the nightspots. In the
midst of all this, I was struggling to get my career
offthe ground. Actually career is too fancy a word. I
was a just a broke-ass picker looking to make a living
making music. Running every which wayhaunting
the beer joints that hid in the shadows of the stockyards, soliciting the club owners who ran the buckets
of blood out on Jacksboro HighwayI was getting nowhere fast. I did manage to get a gig deejaying on
9780735211544_Pretty_TX_pi-xiv_1-290.indd 1
8/26/16 11:13 AM
WILLIE NELSON
KCNC, but that didnt last. Neither did my half-baked

attempts to peddle Kirby vacuum cleaners and Encyclopedia Americanas. Proud to say, I was no good at
convincing peopleespecially hardworking people
to buy stuff they didnt need. What I needed was a
break.
And a break meant a hit song. I didnt care if I sang
it or someone else did. If I found a bandleader wholiked
what Id written, Id sell my tune for the price of dinner. Thats how desperate I was. Yet in the midst of my
desperation, I also saw that others were more desperate than me. Which is where this story begins.
A week before Christmas, I was determined to get

into the holiday spirit. Wasnt easy because my wife
was singing the blues about bills we couldnt pay. We
were living in a cramped two-room apartment with
our three little ones. Most nights I was gone, lookingfor places to play my music, and by the time I got
home, the kids were up and my wife was off to her
waitress job. On this particular morning, two days before Christmas, my mother-in-law was good enough to
watch the children while I drove downtown for some
last-minute shopping. But, as luck would have it, my
8/26/16 11:13 AM
PRE T T Y PAPER
beat-up Ford Fairlane wouldnt start, the battery dead

as a doornail. So I caught the bus.
I was freezing. The heater on the bus was busted,
and my plaid wool jacket, which had seen better days,
couldnt keep me warm. But what the hell. I was happy
because last night Id found a barroomBig Bills on
Main Street near the slaughterhouseswhere I could
sing some of my songs. Folks liked what they heard
and I wound up with twenty-five dollars worth of tips
in my pocket, a minor miracle. It was just the sort of
encouragement that I needed to keep going. So todayI
wasnt bothered by the gray sky. Last nights tips told
me that beyond the gray, the sun was shining. Besides, cold can be exhilarating. Best of all, snow was
in the forecast, meaning that my kids might get to
enjoy their first white Christmas.
I got off at Houston Street in the middle of downtown. The sidewalks were crowded with shoppers,men
in fedoras and long overcoats, women in furs, kids
bundled up with scarves and mittens. The store windows were decorated with wreaths and poinsettias. I
could see my breath in the frosty air. Already a few
flakes had begun to fall. Everyones expectations were
high. Everyones heart was full. A beautiful Christmas was just around the cornera Christmas when,
8/26/16 11:13 AM
WILLIE NELSON
at least for a day, we could forget our troubles and

enjoy simple fellowship with family and friends.
Up ahead was Leonards, the mammoth department store that took up six city blocks, the establishment that advertised
ONE -STOP SHOPPING W ITH MORE
MERCH A N DISE FOR LE SS MONEY.
During the holidays,
Leonards was also famous for installing a Santa

Claus monorail and an elaborate Toyland department.
When it came to Christmas cheer, Leonards was
thespot.
But then, all of a sudden, a few steps down from
the stores main entrance, I saw someone who stopped
me in my tracks: a man, whose legs had been amputated above his knees, supporting himself on a large
wooden board resting on four wheels. The board held
not only the man but an array of neatly arranged
products that he was sellingwrapping paper, pencils
and ribbons. In addition to the traditional Christmas
colors of green and red, his merchandise also came
in blue, orange, purple and yellow. He easily moved
around the board, supporting himself with his long,
strong arms.
Pretty paper! he sang out in a strong and emotional voice. Pretty ribbons of blue... wrap your presents to your darling from you... pretty pencils to write
I love you.
8/26/16 11:13 AM
PRE T T Y PAPER
He sang like he meant it. In fact, he sang like a

singer. He sang in tune. Sadly, he also seemed to be
singing in vain. I didnt see a single person stop to buy
his wares. And yet that didnt stop his singing. I
sensed that he sang to lift his spirits and stay warm.
I stood about nine or ten feet away from him, off to
one side, so he wouldnt see me studying him.
What I saw was a man who looked to be roughly
my agein his early thirtiesa handsome man with
chestnut-brown eyes and a brown beard covering his
square-jawed face. He had a broad nose and thick eyebrows. He wore a black turtleneck sweater with big
gaping holes. His blue jeans, which covered the stumps
of his legs, were tattered. Despite his handicap, he
projected a sense of confidence and rugged masculinity. As he sang his song peddling his wares, his eyes
looked upwardabove the crowds passing by, above
Leonards department store, above the streetlights
into a sky filled with snowflakes growing fluffier by
the minute. Some of the flakes landed on the mans
eyes, melting on his lids and giving the impression
that he was crying.
Was he crying? Was he distraught that no one
found the time to stop and inquire about him or his
colorful merchandise? I wanted to stop. I wanted to
ask how he came to be doing what he was doing. How
8/26/16 11:13 AM
WILLIE NELSON
had he lost his legs? His deep brown eyes, wet with
snow, suggested some story. But like the others, I did
not stop. The Christmas rush was on, and even though
I was in no rush at all, I picked up the rhythm of the
downtown shoppers. I hurried along. I left the man on
the rolling wooden board and rushed into the store.
I bought perfume for my wife, candy for my motherin-law, a model train for my son and dolls for my girls.
When the salesclerk asked if I wanted them giftwrapped, without thinking I said, Yes, please. But
then I changed my mind. I thought of the man selling
pretty paper. I wasnt much of a wrapper, but I could
figure it out. This guy deserved a break, and buying
his goods seemed like the right thing to do. After all,
it was Christmas.
So with my unwrapped gifts, I left Leonards. Now
the snow was coming down harda rare event in this
part of Texas. The wind was kicking up a storm. The
temperature had dipped down into single digits. It was
hard to see, hard to walk against the howling wind.
Folks were hanging on to light poles and the sides
ofbuildings. Looking around, I couldnt see my man.
Where had he gone? Maybe hed moved on. Battling
the wind, I circled all the way around Leonards enormous complex. I went up and down the block two,three,
8/26/16 11:13 AM
PRE T T Y PAPER
four times. Something told me I had to find him. But

by now I was walking through a virtual blizzard.
I couldnt look forever. Hed probably found shelter
in some nearby coffee shop. Or maybe he actually
went inside Leonards to wait out the storm. So I reentered the store, where, for the next twenty minutes, I
looked from one end to the other. But he was nowhere
to be found. I gave up the search. Feeling a littleguilty,
I went to the clerks who had sold me my gifts and
asked that they be wrapped. I was instructed to go to
thethird-floor gift-wrap department. After waiting in
line for twenty minutes, I asked the gift wrapper a
hefty middle-aged woman wearing a Santas capif
she knew about the man who sold pretty paper, pencils and ribbons on the street outside the store.
Oh, that bum, she said condescendingly. Hes
nothing but a nuisance.
He didnt seem like a bum, I said. He sounded
like a singer.
Busy making bows on the packages containing my
daughters dolls, the wrapper didnt respond. Im not
sure she heard what I said or, if she had, she didnt
think it was worth a reply.
I took the presents and, still looking for the man
as I headed for the exit, left Leonards. Outside, the
8/26/16 11:13 AM
WILLIE NELSON
weather had worsened. With a shopping bag in each

hand, I was barely able to fight my way through the
wind to the bus stop. Still no peddler in sight. Fortunately the bus came along in a few minutesthis one
was heatedand I took my seat and rode back home.
We had a nice Christmas. Big Bills made the difference. I worked there consistently through the holidays, meaning I could pay off some back bills and
make peacenot to mention a little lovewith my old
lady. The kids loved their presents, my mother-in-law
loved her chocolates, and I thought if I could keep gigging and save a little money, maybe, just maybe, I
could make that move to Nashville, where I might
have better luck selling my songs.
8/26/16 11:13 AM
5.625 8.5 SPINE: 0.97
Pour Me a Life is an unapologetically honest, raw, and often harrowing account of the life of a man
who, up until now, we only thought
we knew. Here is A.A. Gill at his best.
A real-life Bright Lights, Big City.
Eric Ripert, chef and co-owner of
Le Bernardin, and author of the
New York Times bestseller 32 Yolks
was born in Edinburgh. The author of nine

books, including The Angry Island, he is the
TV and restaurant critic and a regular features
writer for The Sunday Times, a columnist for
Esquire, and a contributor to Vanity Fair. He
lives in London and has been nominated for
more awards than he has won.
Gills story holds up a mirror with

which to evaluate ones own ugly
and beautiful jaunts through life.
His is not a tale told with a clear
beginning, middle, or end; it is, however, chock full of wit and humanity,
and enhanced by Gills striking gift
for prose. Publishers Weekly
Gill writes passionately and movingly about his struggle with dyslexia; disarmingly and defensively
about his lifelong feelings of intellectual insecurity; evocatively about
his relationships with his parents
and the disappearance of his brother
[and] stirringly about his love of
journalism.
Matthew Adams,
The Independent (UK )
Pour Me a Life is alert, emphatic,
mordant, unforgiving. It is often
moving, but never tries to be likeable. . . . [Gills] gallows comedy
9780399574917_PourMeALife_jk_r3.indd 1
gives a hefty kick, many sections are

beautifully droll, and some scenes are
hilarious.
Richard Davenport-Hines,
The Sunday Times (UK )
Gill is a brilliant raconteur, and a
gifted satirist of place and person.
. . . The baroque debauchery of his
drinking days gives way to frank and
often moving examinations of his
growing up . . . [of ] his loves and lusts
and marriages, and his own efforts at
fatherhood: the role that has done
most to keep him sober.
Tim Adams, The Observer (UK )
In this chilling, exquisitely moving
book, Gill defines the seductive,
addictive and destructive power
of drink. . . . It is his honesty that
accounts for the intensity of this
haunting memoir.
Juliet Nicolson,
The Telegraph (UK )
Showcases Mr. Gills gifts as a writer

of rude invective, hyperbolic description and splenetic asidesa writer
who seems to have inhaled the prose
styles of Auberon Waugh, Clive James
and Alexander Theroux and come
up with an idiosyncratic voice all his
own.
Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times
est known for his hysterically funny

and often scathing restaurant reviews
for the London Sunday Times, A.A.
Gills Pour Me a Life is a riveting
memoir of the authors alcoholism,
seen through the lens of the memories that
remain, and the transformative moments in art,
food, religion, and family that saved him from a
lifelong addiction and early death.
By his early twenties, at Londons prestigious
Saint Martins art school, journalist Adrian Gill
was entrenched in alcoholism. He writes from
the handful of memories that remain, of drunken
conquests with anonymous women, of waking to
morbid hallucinations, of emptying jacket pockets that were like tiny crime scenes, helping him
puzzle his whereabouts back together. Throughout his recollections, Gill traces his childhood,
his early diagnosis of dyslexia, the deep sense of
isolation when he was sent to boarding school at
age eleven, the disappearance of his only brother,
whom he has not seen for decades.
When Gill was confronted at age thirty by a
doctor who questioned his drinking, he answered
honestly for the first time, not because he was
ready to stop, but because his body was too damaged to live much longer. Gill was admitted to a
thirty-day rehab centerthen a rare and revolutionary concept in Englandand has lived three
decades of his life sober. Written with clear-eyed
honesty and empathy, Pour Me a Life is a haunting
account of addiction, its exhilarating power and
destructive force, and is destined to be a classic
of its kind.
8/1/16 3:16 PM
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pour me
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LIFE
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5/18/16 1:06 AM
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375 Hudson Street
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Copyright 2015, 2016 by A.A. Gill

Originally published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
formwithout permission. You are supporting writers and allowing
is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
The mission statement of Parade magazine is reprinted by permission
of Parade, part of the Athlon Media Group.
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ISBN 9780399574917
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Wake up! Youre at sea, it doesnt matter which sea, its just the
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sea rising and falling. Sea-flavored, sea-shaped, wet sea. Youre
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in a boat, a little boatyoure alone in a little boat. There is
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nothing else in the boat but you. The boat bobs. You bob. You
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have no idea how you got here. This, at least, is not unusual.
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You woke up in a boat on a sea alone. You look along the hori-
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zon, its as sharp as a razor cut. Theres nothing but sea and
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the cloche of the sky, the salty bobbing earth curving away...
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and then there is something just there, there where the sun
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makes the water flare and shimmy. There are two dots. Two
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things that arent sea, theyre boats. Now there are three boats
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in the sea. These other boats have a purpose, they have come
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for you and that is the nature of these things, these instructive
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fables. The inner narrator tells you that though they are com-
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ing solely for you, you can stop only one. And to help you
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choose which, the chorus adds that on the one boat there is a
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man who will give you food, fresh water, some oars and direc-
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tions to get to land, and hell even come with you if you like,
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but in the other boat there is only a bloke who if you ask him
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a.a. gill
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will tell you how you got here. So thats the dilemmawhich
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boat do you stop?
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Were back in a room in a private mental hospital in the
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west of England. They call it a treatment center. This is where
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you can get treatment. Really, its a mental hospitalwere
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mental. Thats why we need treating, were dying. Everyones
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dying, of course, but we know it, we can taste it, metallic in
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our sticky condemned stumpy mouths. We know were close to
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the shuffling end of the coil and its our fault, we caused it, we
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caused it on purpose, we chose the way of our deaths, we can
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smell it in the damp corruption, our breathless musty mortal-
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ity. It lingers in our jackets, on the blankets, in our sad evacuee
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suitcases. This morning, the doctor holding a file said, Have
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you stopped drinking? Yes, I said. Are you sure? he said,
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giving me the look, the look of nonjudgmental disbelief that is
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the facial uniform of mental treatment. Yes, I said, yes. We say
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yes a lotit doesnt mean yes, it means stop asking me ques-
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tions. Yes? Good. Because Ive got your tests back...and if
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you go on, you probably wont see Christmas.
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Im thirty. Outside the window there is the sea of green
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lawn, with croquet hoops, rolling down past trees. I remember
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them as cedars, huge and lost, standing outside this white clas-
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sically country house. How easily the architecture of the aris-
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tocracy lends its aspirations to the infirm and the insane.
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Perhaps Ive imported cedarsmaybe theyre from some other
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rolling lawn. I get lawns confused. Lawns just lie there with a
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permanent ennui, a sickly languor. I wonder what the rest of
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pour me a life
nature makes of a lawn. Arrogant, snobbish, entitled, needy,
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effortfully polite, sober. Rebuke of the wild.
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Were here because were dying. Death presses up against
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the broken mirror, death stands in the corner of the bedroom,
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signals from the blood in the bog, the pus in the sock, the tin-
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gling in the fingers. It wasnt death that terrified us into this
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preposterously genteel bedlam with its contrite normal lawn.
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It isnt the winnowing flail of mortality that grabbed us by the
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scruff and dragged us all here. Understand this, its not death
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that t errifiesits life. Life is the horror, the unbearable living.
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We are suffering from life trauma...the miserable, sham-
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bling, boring, self-pitying lives we have fashioned for our-
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selves, alone, with shaking hands and a tearful despair.
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So which boat would you stop? The counselor is a young
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man, a knowing public school compassionate man. I try to
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imagine his life but cant. Why would you be here if you werent
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mad or carrying the dead weight of a chronic life? Why frolic in
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the bleak mere of others troubles posing as a new-life sales-
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man? We listen to him not because he talks compassion or sense
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but because hes plainly the captain of the boat with the stuff,
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the gear. We are the people who have run out of choices, run
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through choices and chances: second chances, last chances, sim-
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ple choices, choices that were no choice at all. Always wrong, all
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desperate, always hopeful. Every cast of the bones was a loser.
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So heres the choice to finally give up on choice; the chance at
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the far end of choices. There is an infinitesimal lightening in the
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room like the blowing away of a paper hat, and we choose all
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a.a. gill
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together, unanimously. We look at the man with his life so
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sorted he can spare the time to sell us a new one and we feel
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ourselves bobbing at sea on a lawn and we shout in our s our-
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salt tight mouths, Throw us a line. Give us an oar. Tow us to
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the further shore, to the new land where we can be whole. Take
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us where we can wash away this life that we made with the
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sweat of our face. Relieve us of the dead burden.
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This is Choice Theory. Its a real thing. It was thought up
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by an American, a psychiatrist called William Glasser who
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worked in a veterans hospital in Los Angeles in the 60s. He
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got fed up with listening to people whine about their lives and
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regress through their sadness to find the germ of misery in
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some childish darkness. He decided that what you do is more
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important than what you did...you dont have to scrabble
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about in a cellar of nostalgia to discover the seed of your mad-
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ness, just get on with now, do the practical stuff: make your
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bed, make a list, brush your teeth, brush your shoes, mind
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your manners, tell a truth, get up, sit up, stand up, own up, call
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your mother. If your feet point one way, your head cant face
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the other. They tell us that a lot. This thing is also called
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Control Theory and Reality Therapy and Cognitive Be
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havioral Therapy. Its a firemans therapya 911 therapy. Its
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an ax and a ladder, a chance for people who are dying faster
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than they can talk, who dont have the time or the honesty or
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the inclination or the words, who dont need any more drugs.
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Its a cutto
the-
cure therapy. If you behave like a normal
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ninetofive guy, then sooner or later you turn into one. Fake it
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to make it, they say...fake it to make it. You dont even have
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5/18/16 1:06 AM
pour me a life
to believe. Fake it to make it is a particularly adroit one-size
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therapy for drunks and junkies because were already good at
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faking stuff and we need things to happen pretty pronto. We
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need a hit. Were not feeling great at the moment. Bill Glasser
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also believed that there were five things that people needed in
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order to function properly, and the first and the greatest of
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these was love. It wasnt an original thought. But they dont
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tell us this, because frankly no one wants to be told that the
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answer to everything is love. No one wants the payoff of his
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tragedy to be the chorus of a pop song.
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The night after the last-chance choice, I lie in the dark of a
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dormitory; there are six or seven of us, no one can sleep. I
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dont mind sharing a room, Id been to a boarding school, but
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the others, the hard boys with scars, they hate it and rant at
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the propinquity, rage against intimacy. We cant sleep because
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were frightened of the dark; of sleeping; of crying out; of
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blurting; of wetting ourselves; of dreaming. We lie in the cold
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sweat with the stinking shroud blankets pulled over our faces
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and feel the s elf-pity pour into our mouths until were drown-
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ing in regret, and we gasp in panic and in turn tell one another
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war stories, our voices like distant radios. Theres this boy in
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his early twenties, hes tall but he moves like an old, old man,
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painfully mistrusting gravity. Hes covered in psoriasis and
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bubbling sores, his nose is bust and his teeth are gone. His
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body is very close to worn dead. I watched him pack himself
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into the bed with the slow gentleness of a curator storing
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ancient porcelain. He has a thick Midlands accent: I live
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rough. Ive lived rough since I was sixteen. My dad was drunk,
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my mum didnt like me. I beg and steal for gear. I live in a
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multistory car park in Birmingham. Why? a voice asks
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from the dark. Why do you live in a pissy car park? Youre a
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fucking tramp. You can go anywhere, thats the only thing to
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be said for being a tramp. Oh yes, the flat vowels answer,
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Ive got a place in the country as well, a telephone box outside
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Sutton Coldfield for the weekends. And we start laughing,
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laughing and laughing and laughing with great wheezing guf-
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faws; laughter that bounces and tumbles off the ceiling and
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jumps on the beds, billowing the blankets. The noisy, lumpy,
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hilarious breath runs through me like a great brightness. Mag-
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ical, free laughter that spins me back to being a child; a hiccup-
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ing, chorus-rolling, crashing, howling, sobbing laughter, so
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unexpected, so strange, like finding that all together we can
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sing. The tears swim down my cheeks and soak the pillow.
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Every time the wave recedes someone catches it, pulling us
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back, sighing, Outside Sutton Coldfield, not wanting to lose
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this moment, this marvelous noise. The black dormitory is
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raucous with small boys who had all their choices ahead of
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them. That was the moment I knew I had a chance.
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Twenty-seven years later I realize that I stopped the wrong

boat.
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My first wife left me in the middle of a dinner party. I cant
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remember what I said or what she said. I dont remember a row
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or a diagnosis of inoperable discontent. I dont think anything
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was thrown and I dont know who else was there. Not a single
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pour me a life
face or name comes back to me, though I remember the detri-
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tus, the stained glasses, collapsed napkins, the stricken Stilton;
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the evidence of a room full of people that remained for weeks
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like a crime scene or a Spanish still life, a memento mori, the
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corruption of earthly vanity and fleshly lust. I do remember
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that we served three sorts of eggsgoose, duck and quail. Why
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would we offer three eggs? Four if you count a hens egg in the
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mayonnaise. Who did we think we were becoming? Offering up
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dinner parties with napery and S tiltonsit was like charades in
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the bunker. I suppose, along with goose eggs, it was a sort of
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married life manqu we hoped we might cobble together out of
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stuff and things and expectations; out of orphaned china cups
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and potpourri and Gollancz hardbacks with bacon bookmarks,
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old, bald velvet and sepia erotica, Charles Trenet and Wallace
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Stevens and cut flowers out of season in Arts and Crafts vases
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with broken handles and portrait gallery postcards on a Welsh
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dresserdid we actually own a Welsh dresser?and the willful
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extravagance of a t issue-paper basement bohemianism.
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It was never really us. We were us, once. We had been very
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us, but the life we made out of each other wasnt. So she left
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because there wasnt anything worth staying for and no pros-
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pect of anything worth having or becoming. I knew what she
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meant. I had every sympathy. If I could have gone with her, I
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would h
aveleft the marriage behind with the washing up,
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left it to wilt in the vase, fester with the cheese, watched over
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by the judgmental curling faces of Christopher Isherwood and
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Lady Ottoline Morrell.
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This story, this memoir, falls between these two events. The
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three eggs and the phone box outside Sutton Coldfield. It is the
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year between the end of the marriage and the end of drinking.
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I say its a year, but I have no reliable chronology. It might be
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only six months, or eighteen; it is the space between two ends
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each looking the other way. To call it a memoir is to imply
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memory, a veracity, a recall, that I couldnt...cant put my
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hands on. None of this is handonthe-Bible fact. The one mi
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serly charity of drink is that it strips away memory. You start
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by forgetting the last hour of Saturday night, a name, a conver-
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sation, how you lost your shoes, and then, as the life begins to
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tumble like an upended skier, so the avalanche of forgetting
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comes and sweeps up the evidence, burying the remembrance
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in a soft white darkness, a roaring silence. After time, youve
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forgotten more than you can remember. For me, out of a decade
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I have perhaps two years, perhaps three, of remembrances. Not
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consecutive, not related or correlated, just images...like frag-
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ments from sagas found stuffed in a mattress, torn photographs
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on rubbish heaps, strips of wallpaper painted over that make
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you wonder at the life that once flourished in your bedroom.
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There is a hope, if not a reliable fact, that this is the best I
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can muster, this is a retrospective truth gleaned from the
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shards and tesserae. An attempt to reimagine something lost,
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an emotional archaeology sifting through the midden for a
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bone, a coin, a few words scrawled on a flyleaf. My darling,
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will you..., an earring in a dinner jacket pocket. Without
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tools or skill, scheme or expectation, this is an attempt to
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reconstruct, resurrect the boat that was going the other way
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and its cargo, its log of how I got here. Because frankly the
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5/18/16 1:06 AM
pour me a life
Choices thing doesnt work the way it used to. Choices beget
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choices like an infection. I have been sober longer than I was
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drunk, every day I choose not to drink is now no harder than
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choosing to wear my shoes on the prescribed feet and having
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my face point over my toes. Its not the all or the enough, its
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not the answer. I am now closer to my last breath than I am to
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my last drink and I need to know.
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But lets get one thing straight, this is no faith-infused pul-
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pit tale of redemption. This isnt going to be my debauched
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drink-and-drug hell, there will be no lessons to learn, no expe-
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rience to share, there wont be handy hints, lists, golden rules,
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you will find no encouragement for those who still stagger. Im
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not shifting through this soggy tangle of a shredded life for
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your benefit, I have no message, no help. This isnt a book to
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give to your sister whose son is having too good a time, or the
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friend who struggles with his cravings like a randy fat girl
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squealing No, no, no as her hand shimmies up your shirt.
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I met my wife in The Lindsey Club. A busted sign above a
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door that opened onto a thin, peely corridor. Under a pale bulb
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sat Renee. Old. Apparently made by workhouse orphans out of
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parchment, t annin-stained calico and chicken bones. She was a
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wisp of a woman who was sustained by cold tea and custard
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creams. She spoke in a genteel voice that sounded like the re-
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sponses at Evensong. If she recognized you, she would give you
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a cloakroom ticket for 50p and you could go on down the
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stairs. Renee would spend her day comforting and confronting
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the drunk, the deranged and the damned. She was the most ef-
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fective bouncer Ive ever seen. So delicate and antique, so plainly
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breakable, that not even the most pugnaciously hammered
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thug would consider taking it to the mat. Ive watched men
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grab their own collars and eject themselves, screaming that
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they would go quietly, rather than risk chipping Renee. Mur-
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derers would come back the morning after some psychotic out-
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burst, blinking back tears, begging forgiveness, and she would
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be as stern as a remembrance wreath. Downstairs there was a
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bald h
alf-size pool table on a tilt, an ancient jukebox that I
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only remember playing Sinatra crooning My Kind of Town,
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a short bar and a mismatched collection of tables and chairs.
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There were yellow lights with red shades like flung knickers,
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and a carpet that had the texture of warm tar.
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The place was coated with nicotine and despair. It was the
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most hopelessly sad and lonely room Ive ever known. There
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were glazed windows with curtains, behind which was painted
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a Home Counties landscape, a wry trompe loeil that twisted
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the truthwe were in a cellar, a burrow, a tomb where the
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wounded, sodden, failed and frightened came to hide. On the
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wall there was a reproduction of a painting of eighteenth-
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century huntsmen enjoying a tale and a tincture in some ami-
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able country hostelry. They were the bucolic English yeomen of
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yore, ruddy and true, loyal, jolly, prosperous and sturdy. The
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picture was a slap, a caution, a reminder of how far from the
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ideal of manhood and society I had fallen. All the coy senti-
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mental attempts to cheer up the bar, tranquilize it with kitsch,
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pour me a life
the plastic flamenco dancers and china poodles, became the
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malevolent props of a horror movie.
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You handed your ticket to Peggy behind the bar. Peggy was
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the opposite of Renee. Whatever it was that Renee hadnt eaten
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for the past fifty years, Peggy had. She was a gargantuan
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woman, comically, cartoonishly fat, her body apparently made
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from a series of boiled puddings piled precariously, sagging
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andfalling over one another. She was always reluctant to dis-
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turb the distribution of her bulk once it had settled. She would
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arrange herself over a stool behind the bar and dispense the
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drinks shecould r eachslowly, inexpertly and with prejudice.
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If forced to maneuver for a particularly unlikely ordera sweet
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sherry perhaps, or something nonalcoholicshe would breathe
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deeply through her nose, purse her carmine b

ow-shaped lips, fix
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her eye on the object to be retrieved and tense with the effort of
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propulsion. For a long moment nothing would happen, and
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thenlike a landslide, a bit here and a bit t hereshe wouldbegin
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to topple in different directions. Her head would settle like a
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gyroscope, an arm would wave for balance, and like an elephant
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crossing Niagara Falls on a unicycle, she would oscillatebackand
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forth, making surprisingly elegant progress until the bottle was
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reached and she could retrace her trip backward until the safety
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of the stool would nestle, then gently disappear up her arse.
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In the center of Peggys pale, fleshy, suet-pudding head was
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a face of great sweetness and jollity. She had an infectious rol-
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licking laugh and a sense of humor whose coarseness tran-
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scended its packaging. Aboveground in the daylight, Peggy
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had been an actress and most memorably the voice of Weed
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in Flower Pot Men, a childrens TV puppet show that began in
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the 50s. Weeds role consisted of saying Weeeeed with a
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high-pitched voice in the manner of a daisy.
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The third member of the Lindsey staff was Rita, who owned
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the club. She was also ancient, with a bony, sallow, disapproving
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face and severely neat hair. Rita was permanently disapproving;
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she despised her customers as failed, pathetic specimens. She
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didnt have much time for men if they didnt come with titles or
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horsewhips. Rita told me I should do better for myself than sit
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and drink in the Lindsey. She was really the least likely person
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to run a shabby, subterranean drinking club, but then the Lind-
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sey hadnt always been like this, it too had a past, had aspira-
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tions. Once it was a theater club, a soign stage for amateur and
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professional rising talent. The young Dirk Bogarde had played
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the Lindsey, the yellowing poster was here to prove it. But as
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angry young men and a new r ealism and swearing claimed the
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stage, so the Lindsey withered, its bright jollity declining until
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only the bar remained solvent. And Rita and Renee and Peggy
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were set adrift in it like a lifeboat come to rest here, beached and
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broken on this reef of disappointing men.
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I loved it. I loved it because it was so perfectly tailored to
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mea room I could look in the eye and know that it loved me
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right back. In exchange for the cloakroom ticket, Peggy would
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give you a sausage. The Lindsey existed in the crevices of the
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licensing lawsto drink, you had to eat, and because it was
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notionally a club, it could serve drink outside opening hours.
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The Lindsey only really existed between three in the afternoon

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pour me a life
and five-thirty, and then from eleven p.m. till midnight, which
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would stretch to one a.m. It was for those for whom the licensed
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day was not long enough to fit in the required pintage, for
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those of us who did alcohol overtime. The drink might kill
04
you, but nobody risked eating the sausage: it went to my dog,
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Lily, a lurcherly mongrel who lived under benches and on sau-
06
sages. Always ahead of me after closing time at the Elephant &
07
Castle up the road was Alex Trocchi, the Scottish novelist and
08
lifelong junkie. Alex, granite-faced, angry iconoclast, fearless
09
nihilist, rager against the night, had managed to make heroin
10
seem parochial, rather bourgeois. Hed done it for so long that
11
it had become a pomade, a tonic, it never seemed to make any
12
difference to his demeanor. I never saw him gouch or get
13
scratchy. He had a small antiquarian book business and a mas-
14
sive immovable writers block. Sometimes hed buy my paint-
15
ings. Wed sit in corners, him reading fasta solace and a
16
distraction and I imagine a tortureoften with Kit Lambert,
17
son of the composer Constant Lambert and manager of The
18
Who. Kit had had a palazzo in Venice, which he lost or set fire
19
to. He lost everything, including most of the things he tried to
20
put in his mouth. The front of him looked like an abandoned
21
gannet colony. Kit had been arrested for drugs and was con-
22
vinced that his best defense was to make himself a ward of the
23
court so that the official solicitor gave him pocket money out
24
of his own considerable royalties. Kit looked like a furious
25
French bulldog. He had a voice that sounded like someone con-
26
tinuously trying to start a lawn mower, and he was clownishly
S27
clumsy. He could clear a table simply by looking at his watch;
N28
13
5/18/16 1:06 AM
a.a. gill
01
it was all so immensely funny and clever and cultured when he
02
wasnt incoherently drunk. He had an incandescent temper,
03
and if I ever told him to stop setting fire to my clothes or tip-
04
ping beer into my lap, hed shout at the top of his mechanical
05
voice, Oh nanny, nanny, nanny, Gill...fuck off. His life
06
had shrunk to a single Herculean tantrum at the parsimony of
07
his executors. The madder he got, the more parsimonious they
08
became. He would conceive ever more absurd ruses to get his
09
money back. He died after being in a fight in a gay club and
10
then falling down his mothers stairs. Alex died of pneumonia
11
three years later. I still have a copy of his Cains Book, inscribed
12
To Lily, instead of a sausage.
13
The rest of the Lindseys customers were art students, dip-
14
lomatic protection o
fficersone of whom once pulled his gun
15
on memean little criminals, actors, Montenegrin jeans sales-
16
men and Kensingtons decrepit and fallen gentry. Men with
17
stinking blazers and burst veins, women who had compacts
18
and cigarette holders and who wet themselves on bar stools.
19
And I seem to remember a statistically significant number of
20
men with nonspecific wounds.
21
I was sitting under the window, looking out over the Home
22
Counties reading The Standard, and a girl standing at the bar
23
slid in opposite me. Id noticed her because the room was small
24
and there were so few strangers. She was gamine and preter-
25
naturally vivacious for the Lindsey. She wore corduroy shorts,
26
lisle tights and a handmedown Fair Isle cardigan. She had
27S
clever eyes that dodged behind a faded fringe. She said I looked
28N
sad. I told her that the girl I was in love with was in New York
14
5/18/16 1:06 AM
pour me a life
and I couldnt afford to go to New York, and she couldnt be
01
here, so I was sad. She agreed that that was sad, pulled a large
02
glittering ring off her finger and pushed it across the table.
03
Take this, Im sure its worth a ticket to New York...No,
04
really...you must take it, go now, go today. It was my g reat-
05
aunts engagement ring...she was marvelous, had masses of
06
lovers and would simply insist you take it. What on earth are
07
engagement rings for, if not to bring lovers together? I said I
08
couldnt possibly, but it was incredibly, brilliantly kind of her
09
and it had stopped me from feeling sad and at least I could buy
10
her a drink. I dont even know your name, I said. Im Cressida
11
Connolly, she said, sticking out her hand and cocking her
12
head to one side with a grin that was half warm, half defen-
13
sive, and that I would come to know well. Well, Im...Oh,
14
I know who you are, she said. Six months later

maybe
15
t welveshe tapped the shoulder of a man in aqueue at a bak-
16
ers and said, Im going to marry your son.The man looked
17
askance and replied, Weve never met. How do you know
18
who I am or that I even have a son? And Cressida cocked her
19
head and grinned: You could only be Adrians father.
20
A few months after t hator maybe w

eeksI was lying in
21
a morning bath and she brought me an orphan cup of warm
22
milk and brandy and said, You know, if we get married, Ill
23
always make sure theres beer in the fridge.
24
Romantically we peaked too soon.
25
26
S27
N28
15
5/18/16 1:06 AM
5.25 8.25 SPINE: 1.05
Rules
for Others
to Live By
comments &
self- contradictions
Richard
Greenberg
tony awardwinning author of take me out
9780399576522_RulesForOthe_JKF.indd 1
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RULES
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FOR OTHERS
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TO LIVE BY
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Comments and
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Self-Contradictions
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Richard
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Greenberg
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blu e r ider pr ess
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n ew yor k
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9780399576522_RulesFor_i-xviii_1-302_5P.indd 7
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375 Hudson Street
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Copyright 2016 by Richard Greenberg

voices,promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying
an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by
not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without
permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to
continue to publish books for every reader.
Blue Rider Press is a registered trademark and its colophon is
a trademark of P
enguin Random House LLC
Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data
Names: Greenberg, Richard, author.
Title: Rules for others to live by : comments and self-contradictions /
Richard Greenberg.
Description: New York : Blue Rider Press, 2016.
Subjects:
LCSH: Greenberg, RichardHumor. | Dramatists,
American20th centuryBiography. | Conduct of lifeHumor.
BISAC: HUMOR / Form / Essays. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY /
Editors, Journalists,
Publishers. | HUMOR / General.
Classification: LCC PS3557.R3789 Z46 2016 | DDC 812/.54 [B]dc23
p.cm.
13579108642
24
Book design by Amanda Dewey
25
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that

spirit,we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story,
the experiences, and the words are the authors alone.
26S
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8/9/16 8:32 AM
01
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Wisdom
06
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I am a very wise man.
10
How I know this is, a number of people have told me so,
11
among them several who consider my intelligence average
12
and my talent meh. Wisdom is another quality altogether.
13
It might surprise you to learn of my wisdom, especially
14
given that my life is patently disastrous. Its the old saw
15
about doing and teaching, which, in addition to being a
16
truism, is true. You can see it in all kinds of situations. For
17
example, drawing from my own world, theres not a theater
18
critic alive capable of writing a play, yet two of them are
19
competent reviewers.
20
When it comes to developing wisdom, failure turns out
21
to be an advantage. I once talked to a group of playwriting
22
students among whom, startlingly, was a woman who had
23
written four novels that had been decent commercial and
24
strong critical successes but who claimed she had no idea
25
what she was doing. I didnt believe this. You simply cannot
S26
have four consecutive flukes. She was adamant. Years later,
N27
8/9/16 8:32 AM
RICHARD GREENBERG
01
I read a book about the early days of Barbra Streisand and
02
I understood what the novelist meant.
03
It seems that Barbra never valued her singing because it
04
was too easy for her. I just open my mouth and it comes
05
out right, she said.
06
This is what the novelist found so perplexing: she had
07
stories to tell and she knew how to tell them. Having read
08
novels, she was able to write novels. She knew what she was
09
doing; what she didnt know was how to describe what she
10
was doing.
11
I dont teach playwriting very often, but when I do Im
12
pretty good at it because Ive faltered as a playwright in so
13
many ways. I look at the student plays and think, almost
14
dotingly, Ah yes: that mistake! Remember it well. Made it
15
myself in the hardscrabble winter of eighty-six. Failure
16
begets consciousness begets, sometimes, technique.
17
18
Ive messed up at living even more spectacularly than I

have at writing, thus my status as a fount.
19
If I have a limitation as a w
isdom-g iver, its my t oo-easy
20
assumption that others are far more capable than I am. As
21
a result, I become testy when they dont follow the rules I
22
set out for them, rules I would never think of applying to
23
my own life. Im trying to get better about this.
24
Before I was a wise man, I believe I was a bit of a char
25
latan. That was during my late twenties and early thirties.
26S
People were always coming up to me and thanking me for
27N
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8/9/16 8:32 AM
RUL ES FOR OTHERS TO LIVE BY
changing their lives when I said to them such-and-such.
01
The problem was that when they quoted such-and-such
02
back to me, I neither remembered saying it nor had any
03
idea if I believed it. In those days, my wisdom was what I
04
would call cadential wisdom. The sentences I put out had
05
the shape and rhythm of truth but were actually rather
06
vapid. You can go far on this talent.
07
The late Maya Angelou wrote the beautiful memoir I
08
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. After that, she became a
09
public figure, in which role she was a virtuosa of cadential
10
wisdom, and the power of the curious things she said was
11
magnified by her extraordinary speaking voice. This is why
12
when Oprah shares something like Dr. Angelou once said
13
to me, Oprah, its cold out; put on a sweater, it never quite
14
hits us with the prophetic force with which it evidently
15
bushwhacked Oprah.
16
Elaine Stritch, rest in peace, was a great actress, much-
17
loved woman, and riveting Broadway star. She was also
18
imputed with a high degree of cadential wisdom. Show folk
19
thought she carried all sorts of salty insight. I worked with
20
Elaine for two weeks in the late nineties and I thought she
21
was out of her mind. Being out of your mind is not a detri
22
ment when it comes to cadential wisdom, as long as you
23
find adherents for your particular w isdom-giving style.
24
This sort of thing has been going on forever. In its modern
25
form, it can be traced back to the sixties, when, traditional
S26
N27
8/9/16 8:32 AM
RICHARD GREENBERG
01
authority having been lain siege, people were freed up to
02
submit to whatever bogus, m

umbo-
jumboing authority
03
they found sexy. It made no difference that the things these
04
authorities preached never tallied with what was really
05
going on, because so many people had stopped thinking.
06
They had simply stopped thinking.
07
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09
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26S
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36p9 52p6 SPINE: 4p6
(19322003) was
an American icon and country music superstar.
He performed everywhere from Folsom State
Prison to the White House. In 1980 he became
the youngest living person to be chosen for the
Country Music Hall of Fame; he was inducted
into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in
1977, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992,
and the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 2010. A
recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors as well
as the National Medal of Arts, he won nineteen
Grammy Awards, four of them posthumously.
is the author of
twelve collections of verse, including Moy Sand
and Gravel, for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer
Prize for Poetry. He is Howard G. B. Clark Professor at Princeton University, and between 1999
and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford.
Since 2007, Muldoon has been poetry editor of
The New Yorker. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature and of the American Academy
of Arts and Letters.
JACKET DESIGN BY JASON BOOHER

B AC K JAC K E T A R T: FO R E V E R, 2 0 0 3 ,
C O U R T E SY T H E J O H N N Y CA S H E S TAT E

9780399575136_ForeverWords_jk_r2.indd 1
W O R DS
cashforeverwords.com
FO R EVER
PA U L M U L D O O N
JOH NNY CASH
JOHNNY CASH
JOHNNY
CASH
FORE VER
WORDS
U.S.A . $25.00
CANADA $34.00
Since his first recordings in 1955, Johnny

Cash was an icon in the music world. In this
collection of poems and song lyrics that have
never been published before, we see the
world through his eyes and view his reflection
on his own interior reality, his frailties and
his strengths alike. In his hallmark voice, he
pens verses about love, pain, freedom, and
mortality, and expresses insights on culture,
his family, his fame, even Christmas. Forever
Words confirms Johnny Cash as a brilliant and
singular American literary figure. His music is
a part of our collective history, and here the
depth of his artistry and talent become even
more evident.
edited and introduced by PA U L M U L D O O N

foreword by J O H N C A R T E R C A S H
1611
9/13/16 3:54 PM
Forever
Words
The Unknown
Poems
JOHNNY C ASH
Edited by Paul Muldoon
blue rider press

new york
9780399575136_ForeverWords_TX_pi-viii_1-136.indd v
9/23/16 1:46 PM

375 Hudson Street
Copyright 2016 by John R. Cash Revocable Trust

Introduction copyright 2016 by Paul Muldoon
Foreword copyright 2016 by John Carter Cash
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT BY
JOHN CARTER CASH AND STEVE BERKOWITZ
laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form
without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to
continue to publish books for every reader.
Blue Rider Press is a registered trademark and its colophon is a trademark of
Penguin Random House LLC
Names: Cash, Johnny, author. | Muldoon, Paul, editor. |
Cash, John Carter, writer of foreword.
Title: Forever words : the unknown poems / Johnny Cash ; edited by Paul Muldoon.
Description: New York : Blue Rider Press, 2016
Identifiers: LCCN 2016026668 | ISBN 9780399575136 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Country musicTexts.
Classification: LCC ML54.6.C29 L97 2016 | DDC 782.421642026/8dc23
p.
cm.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
9780399575136_ForeverWords_TX_pi-viii_1-136.indd vi
9/23/16 1:46 PM
FOR E WOR D:
R E DE MP T IONS
My father had many faces. There was much that made up the man.
If you think you know John R Cash, think again. There are many
layers, so much beneath the surface.
First, I knew him to be fun. Within the first six years of my life,
if asked what Dad was to me I would have emphatically responded:
Dad is fun! This was my simple foundation for my enduring relationship with my father.
This is the man he was. He never lost this.
To those who knew him wellfamily, friends, coworkers
alikethe one essential thing that was blazingly evident was the
9780399575136_ForeverWords_TX_pi-viii_1-136.indd 1
9/23/16 1:46 PM
light and laughter within my fathers heart. Typically, though his

common image may be otherwise, he was not heavy and dark, but
loving and full of color.
Yet there was so much more...
For one thinghe was brilliant. He was a scholar, learned in
ancient texts, including those of Flavius Josephus and unquestionably of the Bible. He was an ordained minister and could easily
hold his own with any theologian. His books on ancient history,such as Gibbons The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, were annotated, read, reread, and worn, his very soul deeply
ingrained into their threadbare pages. I still have some of these
books. When I hold them, when I touch the pages, I can sense my
father in some ways even more profoundly than in his music.
My father was an entertainer. This is, of course, one of the most
marked and enduring manifestations. There are thousands upon
thousands of new Johnny Cash fans every year, inspired by the
music, talent, andI believe hugelyby the mystery of the man.
My dad was a poet. He saw the world through unique glasses,
with simplicity, spirituality, and humor. He loved a good story and
was quick to find comedy, even in bleak circumstances. This is
evident in one of the last songs he wrote within his lifetime, Like
the 309:
It should be a while before I see Dr. Death

So it would sure be nice if I could get my breath
john n y cash
9/23/16 1:46 PM
Well, Im not the crying nor the whining kind

Till I hear the whistle of the 309
Of the 309, of the 309
Put me in my box on the 309.
Take me to the depot, put me to bed
Blow an electric fan on my gnarly old head
Everybody take a look, see Im doing fine
Then load my box on the 309
On the 309, on the 309
Put me in my box on the 309.
Dad was asthmatic and had great difficulty breathing during

the last months of his life. On top of all this, he suffered with recurring bouts of pneumonia. Still, through the gift of laughter, he
found the strength to face these infirmities. This recording is
steeped in irony, although made mere days before his passing. His
voice is weak, yet the mirth in his soul rings true.
Dad was many things, yes. He was tortured throughout his life
by sadness and addiction. His tragic youth was marked by the loss
of his best friend and brother Jack, who died as the result of a horrible accident when John R was only twelve. Jack was a deeply
spiritual young man, kind and protective of his two-years-younger
brother. Perhaps it was this sadness and mourning that partly defined my fathers poetry and songs throughout his life. He was like-
f o r e v e r wo r d s
9/23/16 1:46 PM
wise defined at the end of his life by the loss of my mother, June
Carter. When she passed, their love was more beautiful than ever
before: unconditional and kind.
Still, it could not be said that any of thisdarkness, love, sadness, music, joy, addictionwholly defined the man. He was all of
these things and none of them. Complicated, but what could be
said that speaks the essential truth? What prevails? The music, of
course... but also... the words.
All that made up my father is to be found in this book, within
these forever words.
When my parents died, they left behind a monstrous amassment of stuff. They just didnt throw anything away. Each and
every thing was a treasure, but none more than my fathers handwritten letters, poems, and documents, ranging through the entirety of his life. There was a huge amount of paperhis studies of
the book of Job, his handwritten autobiography Man in Black, his
letters to my mother, and those to his first wife, Vivian, from the
1950s. Dad was a writer, and he never ceased. His writings ranged
through every stage of his life: from the poems of a naive yet undeniably brilliant sixteen-year-old to later comprehensive studies
on the life of the Apostle Paul. The more I have looked, the more
Ihave understood of the man.
When I hold these papers, I feel his presence within the handwriting; it brings him back to me. I remember how he held his pen,
how his hand shook a bit, but how careful and proud he was of his
penmanshipand how determined and courageous he was. Some
of these pages are stained with coffee, perhaps the ink smudged.
john n y cash
9/23/16 1:46 PM
When I read these pages, I feel the love he carried in those hands.
I once again feel the closeness of my father, how he cared so deeply
for the creative endeavor; how he cared for his loved ones.
There are some of these I feel he would have wanted to be
shared, some whose genius and brilliance simply demanded to be
heard. I hope and believe the ones chosen within this book are
those he would want read by the world.
Finally, it is not only the strength of his poetic voice that speaks
to me, it is his very life enduring and coming anew with these writings. It is in these words my father sings a new song, in ways he has
never done before. Now, all these years past, the words tell a full
tale; with their release, he is with us again, speaking to our hearts,
making us laugh, and making us cry.
The music will endure, this is true. But also, the words. It is ultimately evident within these words that the sins and sadnesses have
failed, that goodness commands and triumphs. To me, this book is
a redemption, a cherished healing. Forever.
John Carter Cash
35,000 feet above western Arkansas, flying east...
f o r e v e r wo r d s
9/23/16 1:46 PM
C A L IF OR NI A POE M
1966
Theres trouble on the mountain

And the valleys full of smoke
Theres crying on the mountain
And again the same heart broke
The lights are on past midnite
The curtains closed all day
Theres trouble on the mountain
The valley people say
29
9/23/16 1:46 PM
9/23/16 1:46 PM

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becoming grandma

BLUE RIDER PRESS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

Copyright 2016 by Lesley Stahl

Over the River and

ecoming a grandmother turns the page. Line by line you are

turf. Theres a faint scent of dj vu from when you raised your

whos at the pinnacle: Janet Yellen (sixty-nine), chairwoman of

will be the defining memory of rock music, five hundred years

An imprint of Penguin Random House

Jacket design by Office of Paul Sahre

Photograph of the author by Kris Drake

5.625 8.5 SPINE: 0.97

Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

Copyright 2016 by Chuck Klosterman

Blue Rider Press is a registered trademark and its colophon

Printed in the United States of America

book design by n icole l a roch e

The library in my sixth-grade classroom contained many books

myentire class touched compulsively: The Book of Lists. Published

in 1977, The Book of Lists was exactly what it purported to be521

pages of lists, presented by The Peoples Almanac and compiled by

thumbed through it at random and tried to memorize information

that was both deliberately salacious and generally unencumbered

by the f act-checking process (I still recall the books list of famous

homosexuals, which included only three rock musiciansJanis

ilar work titled The Book of Predictions, in 1980. (I stumbled across

But What If Were Wrong?

it in the late nineties, in the living room of a friend who liked to

buy bizarre outofprint books to peruse while stoned.) Like its

more famous predecessor, The Book of Predictions describes itself: Its

several hundred pages of futurists and scientists (andsomewhat

distractinglypsychics) making unsystematic predictions about

life on Earth in the coming fifty years.

enced today, the angle is inevitably mocking: The most eye-

catching predictions are always the idiotic ones. As it turns out,

there has not been a murder in outer space committed by a jealous

astronaut, which is what lawyer F. Lee Bailey predicted would

occur in 1990 (and evidently struck Bailey as more plausible than

the possibility of defending a jealous Hall of Fame running back

for an earthbound murder in 1994). According to population

expert Dr. Paul Ehrlich, we should currently be experiencing a

dystopian dreamscape where survivors envy the dead, which

predictions are the opposite of terrible: Several speculators accu-

rately estimated the world population in 2010 would be around

seven billion. A handful of technology experts made remarkably

realistic projections about an imminent international computer

network. Charlie Gillett, a British musicologist best known for

writing the first comprehensive history of rock music (1970s The

Sound of the City), somehow managed to outline the fall of the

music industry in detail without any possible knowledge of MP3s

or file sharing.1 Considering how difficult it is to predict what will

A Brief Examination as to Why This Book Is Hopeless

still be true a year from now, any level of accuracy on a f ifty-year

guess feels like a win.

Yet what is most instructive about The Book of Predictions is not

erhaps even conservativea t the

time of publication. And the quality all these reasonable failures

share is an inability to accept that the status quo is temporary. The

Book of Predictions was released in 1980, so this mostly means a

the future of global politics focuses on either (a) an impending

nuclear collision between the two nations, or (b) a terrifying alli-

the entire Book of Predictions assumed the friction between the US