Joe O'Connell | March/April 2011

Tom Grimes

EXCERPT

Tom Grimes was a young writer waiting tables in Key West when Frank Conroy, gifted memoirist (Stop-Time) and recently appointed director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, plucked him from obscurity and dubbed him the next big thing after reading a few chapters of what would become Grimes's second novel, Season's End. Then art met commerce, and Grimes's literary success never quite reached the heights that Conroy predicted. Instead, the two developed a deep friendship. Grimes's rise from waiter to published writer is the subject of Mentor: A Memoir, which was named a "Best Memoir of 2010" by Kirkus Reviews, and a "Best Nonfiction Book of 2010" by the Washington Post. Reviewing the book for the Washington Post, Michael Dirda wrote, "From now on, anyone who dreams of becoming a novelist will need to read Tom Grimes's brutally honest and wonderful Mentor." Apart from Mentor, Grimes is also the author of five novels and a play, and he is the editor of The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers Workshop. He directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Texas State University.

Joe O'Connell: Where did the idea for Mentor come from?

Tom Grimes: I didn't decide to write the book. I stumbled into it and it would have been a weaker book, I think, if I had planned to write it. I'd been asked by Lee Montgomery, an editor at Tin House magazine and the Executive Editor of Tin House Books, to write an essay about Frank for the magazine's "Writers on Writing" series. So I wrote the first three pages and sent them to her. Then she called and said, "This isn't what I meant, or what we'll run in the magazine. The essay should be about Conroy's work. But," she added, "you might have a book here."
Unintentionally, I'd contrasted my father and Frank, who became my surrogate father. I wrote the essay, which Tin House published. And then I continued with what I'd begun to call "the Frank book." I didn't think the book was about me. But I was in his life; therefore, I was a part of his story. At one point, while writing the first draft, I asked myself: why am I in this book so often? The answer was: I used Frank as the lens through which I saw myself. I didn't expect Mentor to be a memoir, and I didn't realize it had become one until I had written about eighty pages.

O'Connell: So how did you approach writing it as a memoir?

Grimes: I wrote what I could remember. As I say in the book, a "true" memoir must be incomplete because one can't remember everything, and certain things one remembers incorrectly. For instance, for about two weeks, as I was trying to get the novel published, I spoke with five or six editors who wanted to buy the book. They mainly wanted to make sure I wouldn't be difficult to work with-a prima donna. These were long conversations, yet only one or two sentences from each conversation appears in the book.
Memoir has a double edge. It works in present and past time. I was writing to recapture the past-you know, Proust's remembered selves. But as Proust also said, memory is an act of imagination. Essentially you recreate events. In turn, this changes your memory of them. Ultimately, I became a stranger to myself as I wrote the book. In the end I didn't know the guy I had been twenty years ago.

O'Connell: There seems to be a shift in tone from the first half of the memoir to the second half.

Grimes: I hadn't thought about this, but it makes sense. In the first half, I'd covered my writing life. In the second half, my friendship with Frank became a larger part of the book. And over time the friendship had changed. I was older, a published writer, and I directed an MFA program. We were no longer teacher and student. We weren't even surrogate father and son. We simply loved one another. You have to let go of your younger self. That's what I wrote about, and I think that accounts for the change in tone.

O'Connell: How is writing a memoir different from writing a novel?

Grimes: Except for my first novel, A Stone of the Heart, which was somewhat autobiographical, my books are entirely imagined. I make up everything. When you're writing fiction you have to generate material. When you're writing autobiography or memoir, you have so much material to draw on that you have to decide what's important. To heighten the book's emotional impact, I wanted to keep Mentor short, so I compressed time as much as possible. I could have written about other events in my life, but just because they happened didn't mean that they were important to the story. The meaning of events is important. If something is meaningless within the context of the story, you shouldn't write about it. And I didn't.

O'Connell: Can you give us a bit about your writing process?

Grimes: I was completely unguarded while I wrote Mentor. I worked incredibly hard-six hours a day with maybe two or three days off during a period of five months. I tried to create a very direct voice. No literary flourishes that might get in the way of the story. I wanted the sentences to be crystal clear. When I gave the manuscript to another writer to read, she said the way I ended sections quickly would be a good lesson for students, something I wasn't consciously aware of. Most of the time you understand what is going on with your writing, but sometimes you don't. In Mentor, the tightness of the prose gives the reader a sense of continuity and the feeling that something is very quickly coming next. And compressing time is a factor in that.

O'Connell: In the book you say, "Every writer is alone and every good book is difficult to write."

Grimes: Even though we've been in workshop situations, we understand that people can talk about the work but ultimately you're in the room by yourself looking at that blank page. There's nobody who's going to be able to help you at that point. Some students say to me, when can we talk about my work? When you've written it, I tell them. As Joyce said, "you can't talk about a book before you've written it otherwise you'll talk it away." So you're on your own. You're in a room by yourself. You have to be really disciplined.
Every good book is hard to write if you're not writing according to a formula where somebody has to die after so many pages. You don't really know where you are and you're calling on different parts of your imagination to create a unique voice. What you've learned from your previous work just tells you that you can finish a book. It doesn't tell you it's going to be good. It doesn't tell you how it should be written. It just tells you that you can write it and you'll be able to figure it out.

O'Connell: Is there a theme to your novels and does it continue in this memoir?

Grimes: I don't think I can pin down what's in every book. But my father was an alcoholic who was quite animated when he was drunk and quite often absent. He was angry and taciturn when he was sober, and always dismissive of me. I guess that would be an emotional echo in every book.

O'Connell: The section of your memoir on finding a publisher and agent for Season's End is harrowing. What advice would you give to a young novelist?

Grimes: If you are fortunate enough to have a number of offers for your book, don't be talked into making a quick decision, no matter what your agent or an editor says. Once an offer is "on the table," it stays there until it's accepted or declined. Remember, a publisher will go out and buy another book the next day or the day after that. You may not have another book to sell for a year, or two, or even ten. So be sure that the decision you make is the decision you're prepared to live with for the rest of your life, regardless of your book's fate. You never want to look back and second-guess yourself. Also, if you have only one offer and you really love and trust the editor who wants to publish your book, get a "key man" clause written into your contract. This protects you in case your editor moves to another house before your book is published and your editor would like to take you and your book along. If you don't have this clause in your contract you will have to remain with your original publisher, but you will have lost your champion inside the house and, most likely, your book will be forgotten, or at least largely overlooked. In short, even though you may be intimidated by the business of publishing, and simultaneously overwhelmed by your good fortune, protect yourself. It's your life and it's your work.

O'Connell: Your memoir has a lot to say about failure also.

Grimes: If you're not prepared to fail, you're not prepared to be a writer. For most of us it's rejection, rejection, rejection. You're rejected at almost every level. Philip Roth hasn't won the Nobel Prize, so even he may feel like a failure.
Most of the time someone else will be writing a book as good as or better than yours. At least some people will think it's better. That's why all writers look for validation. This is particularly a problem for young writers who identify with Mentor the most. As a young writer, you sit at a table in workshop, look at the teacher, and believe the teacher can tell you that you're a writer. Now that I'm a teacher, I understand the longing, but I don't I have the power, or the right, to say who's a writer and who isn't. Besides, I have such low self-esteem that I'm astonished when I realize that students actually value my opinion.
Also, the failure I write about in Mentor is a son's feeling of failure. This comes from my father's estimation of me. If it's pop psychology psychobabble-my dad wasn't good to me-I guess there's some truth to that. As I say in the book, there's an emptiness inside me that no matter how many words I write I can't fill it up. That's my personal sense of failure.
An editor pointed out that I had such huge ambition as a writer. But my ambition wasn't to be on the best-seller list, or to make a lot of money. I wanted to be a writer whose work is read one hundred years from now. That to me is a great writer. Now I understand that what I felt was incredibly idealistic and naïve, but that feeling overtook me at age nineteen when I first read Hemingway. I wanted to be that good. It didn't register with me that he made a lot of money from his work. It was all about the books.
I also now understand that what's great to somebody is not necessarily great to somebody else. After all, they gave the Nobel Prize to Pearl S. Buck. But tastes change. Books you loved when you were young you can't stand when you're older. Books you didn't understand when you're twenty make perfect sense when you're fifty. So what's great literature? I don't know. Lolita maybe. There's nothing else like it.

O'Connell: Which of your books do you consider best?

Grimes: There's always hope that the next book you write will be better than those that came before it. I think Mentor is my best book. My emotions are fully exposed in it. I used thirty years of writing essentially to get out of my own way, to strip down my prose. As I wrote, I thought to myself: make it pristine. Compress time. Chisel sentences. Leave out prepositional phrases. Make the prose as compact as possible. All of my books are different, but at the stylistic level, I think Mentor is my best book. It's also the book that will allow me to die without feeling like a failure. I've felt like one for years. To the outside world I may not have appeared to be a failure, but I'd staked my identity entirely on what I accomplished as a writer, which is dangerous and also selfish. I did some good things that weren't exclusively related to my writing. For instance, I was the person who started the process of restoring the childhood home of Katherine Anne Porter, where we're now sitting. Of course, I got help. Bill Johnson, who lives in Kyle, Texas, wanted to see something done for the town, which at the time had a population of three thousand people. Today it's thirty. Without him there would be no Porter House, which greatly enlarged the visiting writers series at Texas State. Bill once told me that of all of his work as a philanthropist-he donates a lot of money to any number of worthy projects-the existence of the Porter house gives him the most pleasure. Over the past thirteen years, we've become close friends, and it's due to the Katherine Anne Porter House. So it is unfair to the people who helped me accomplish a number of great things related to the program if I have a feeling of who cares what I've done as the MFA program's director and how worthless it is to me personally. But Mentor silenced the internal voices that told me I was a failure, which has allowed me to acknowledge my success in other areas.
Nevertheless, when I was asked, "So when Mentor comes out and it's trashed, or no one reviews it, you're not going to think it's a failure?" I said, no. It's not good. It's not bad. It's necessary. I think every writer has one book that is absolutely necessary to write. For me, Mentor is that book. As a writer, you never know if or when you're going to write that book. You may spend years trying to write the perfect novel, and then this thing that you thought was just a throwaway turns out to be the heart of your work. That's how it is for me with Mentor. I had the good fortune to write this book. All of my demons have been silenced. It's rather shocking to me.

O'Connell: What do you think about "truth" in a memoir in the context of James Frey's hoax?

Grimes: By now, most writers know that Frey's "novel," A Million Little Pieces, was rejected by eighteen publishing houses. Then the same book, pitched as a "memoir," sold for fifty thousand dollars and went on to sell eight million copies. Oprah Winfrey selected the "memoir" for her book club. But when the online magazine The Smoking Gun reported and proved that Frey had invented a great deal of what appeared in his "memoir," he apologized to Oprah after she gave him a tongue lashing on her television show. Afterward, some of the "memoir's" readers said they didn't care about the distinction between fact and fiction. That Frey had lied didn't bother them because the book still "moved" them. Other readers filed a class action suit against Frey. The essence of the dispute is a reader's sense of betrayal. When a writer calls his or her book a novel, a reader understands that what happens in it is imagined, or based on actual events that have been altered significantly to suit the fictional story's aims. But when a writer calls his or her book a memoir, a reader believes that what happens in it is true. So if a memoir writer knows that something is not true yet writes about it as if it were, he or she lies to the reader. Period. As I write in Mentor, "Every 'true' memoir must be incomplete." Since no one can remember everything, when I began the book I made a contract with myself: if I couldn't remember something accurately, I would either leave it out or admit in the text that I remembered it vaguely but couldn't be sure if what I remembered was accurate. Also, under no circumstances would I invent anything. To do so deliberately breaches the ethical contract a writer makes with a reader, and that contract either says I've invented this, or I haven't, because a reader responds differently to what's imagined and what's actual.
Before I began Mentor, the only person I asked for permission to write about what truly happened was my sister. I wanted to write about her first suicide attempt. If she didn't want me to do it, I wouldn't. But she said that it happened twenty years ago, and she no longer had anything to hide, so I included it. Many readers have told me that the scene is painful to read, and I think that's because they're reacting to something true. Had I invented my sister's suicide attempt in order to manipulate a reader's sympathy, my motives and actions would have been despicable; whereas, had I been writing a novel, a scene about the protagonist's sister's suicide attempt may have seemed heavy-handed. But I'd asked the reader to trust me, and in return for the reader's trust, I told them the truth.

O'Connell: What would you tell students with regard to Full Fathom Five, a company Frey formed to create "high concept" young adult novels, and his current contractual negotiations with MFA students?

Grimes: My advice is to pause to consider that you're about to enter a contractual agreement with a proven fraud who has just told you, according to an article published in New York magazine, that "truth" is "bullshit." Do you really want to sign a contract with someone who lied to get his first book published? If so, what makes you think that he'll be honest when it comes to dealing with you? One of the first authors to publish a book under Frey's arrangement wound up suing Frey, who settled the suit in Fall 2010. Frey's a con man, and while he may think his idea is original, it isn't. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, bestselling novelist Jerzy Kosinski ran his own fiction factory, using young writers to crank out novels outlined by Kosinski, who later had them published under his own name. A 1982 Village Voice article claimed that Kosinski's first "novel," The Painted Bird, which depicted his "experiences" during the Holocaust, was peddled as autobiographical, but turned out to be entirely fictional. Kosinski didn't spend the war years wandering the Polish countryside, hiding from the German army, as he writes in the book; he was sheltered by a Catholic family that was not "cruel and abusive" to him. Nonetheless, Kosinski's editor at Houghton-Mifflin said at the time, "It is my understanding that, fictional as the material may sound, it is straight autobiography." Until, suddenly, it wasn't. Kosinski profited off of the Holocaust and sold seventy million books before he committed suicide in 1991. Frey profited off of lies about spending time in rehab to recover from his drug addition and spending several months, rather than several hours, in jail. Finally, the first memoir (or autobiography) wasn't a marketing gimmick dreamed up by publishers a few decades ago, as Frey claims. The first autobiography, Confessions by Saint Augustine is, and it's been in print for sixteen centuries.
Some readers may not care about the distinction between fact and fiction because the book "moved" them. But if a writer knows something is false yet claims it's true, he or she betrays the reader, which is why publishers buy memoirs cautiously today. So if an MFA student tries to sell a memoir, the book will be closely scrutinized before a contract is signed. Plus, your reputation is on the line. Why risk ruining it?

O'Connell: What's next for you?

Grimes: I have no idea what I'm going to write next. Right now I have no desire to write anything. Zero. Zip. Maybe when the book tour is done. I have 300 pages of a novel that I abandoned to write Mentor. I haven't looked at it in almost two years. I struggled with that book. But this is interesting: the narrator of the unfinished novel is also the narrator of Season's End. He's simply twenty years older. I guess I had to revisit that period of my life, somehow. I did it in a memoir. So perhaps I have no idea what I'll write next because I don't know genre I'm ready to work in.

O'Connell: We are sitting in Katherine Anne Porter's childhood home, which brings up an interesting counterpoint. She grew up in Texas but lived her adult life primarily in New York. You are a New Yorker who reluctantly has lived in Texas for the past twenty years.

Grimes: Yes, the reversal is somewhat odd. Texas literary culture never appreciated Porter's work. It wasn't highly regarded because it was "woman's writing." So there remained a lingering bitterness on Porter's part for not being accepted by the people she grew up among and wrote about. She rarely returned to Texas, and when she returned to the renovated house we're now sitting in, she described it in a letter as a dusty, dreary place that was even smaller than she remembered. In her fiction, she describes the house, which is fourteen hundred square feet inside, as though it were Tara from Gone With the Wind.
For a long time, I did want to leave Texas, and I still do. As I write in Mentor, Texas will never be home for me. But now I drive back roads to get to the house. Usually I see sheep grazing in this one particular meadow. Today they weren't around, and I missed them. Sometimes I'll stop, get out of the car, and pet them. I couldn't do this in New York. So occasionally I'm too hard on Texas. But there are still plenty of things about it that I absolutely hate, such as the fact that a dentist from College Station who doesn't have a degree in history sits on the Board of Education and therefore can try to remove Thomas Jefferson from high school history books. I'm also not crazy about one hundred-degree heat. And I can't walk anywhere. In New York, I walk everywhere. Here, people drive their pickup trucks from the living room to the dining room. It's a car culture, which I dislike.
So I am greatly ambivalent with regard to Texas. In one respect, I realize how lucky I am. I've befriended many writers I never would have met if I had not-by chance-become director of Texas State's MFA program. In Mentor, I mention that when I received a call one afternoon from the English department's chair who asked me to come to her office, I thought she was going to fire me. Instead she asked me to direct the program. My personality is such that I'm going to do a good job. It probably comes from guilt. But I also had some business experience and, to build the program, I received a great deal of help from a great number of people.
Tim O'Brien came to Texas State because I left a telephone message for him. When he called he said that coming to Texas for a year sounded great. He wanted to get out of Cambridge. Instantly, we became close friends, and he's been on our faculty for eleven years. He's an incredible writer, of course, but he also cares about the program. He's very generous with students. And he read Mentor at least twice. He even proofread it. He told me that I used "me" rather than "I" incorrectly several times. He gave the copy editor notes! He loves literature, so he said, "I want Mentor to be as close to perfect as possible." I wouldn't have his friendship if I'd taught somewhere else.
This year, Robert Stone is our endowed chair. One day I told him that we needed his college transcripts. The problem was, he never graduated from college. Also, he said, "My grades really weren't very good." I said, "Don't worry. I'll invoke the 'one of the great writers of the 20th-century rule.'" Bob offered a jacket quote for Mentor, which is surreal to me. When I was a young writer, he was an idol of mine. Now he uses my campus office. This astonishes me, and writing Mentor has allowed me to fully appreciate the gifts I've been given.

O'Connell: And now nonfiction will become a bigger part of the MFA program?

Grimes: Yes. We'll conduct a national search for someone to teach it. Recently, I taught memoir writing for the first time. People who were struggling with their fiction wrote amazing nonfiction. I said to one of them, in your novel nothing dramatic happens. Now, within half a page, you've got the story up and running. Your voice is there, your characters are there. Write a memoir; don't go back to the novel. Also, essays written for the class removed the writer's fictional mask, and we all knew one another more fully than we did when the semester began. So we'll continue to teach nonfiction. A nice thing about the form is that it's flexible, unlike short stories, which in workshops often tend to be a bit too conservative.

O'Connell: So it loosens the rules of literature?

Grimes: No. But like many other young writers, I once thought that if a book was on a shelf, it was literature, and that whatever my imagination could produce would never be literature. Literature belonged to Hawthorne, Dickens, and Jane Austen. Gradaully I realized that literature is a process. That it's being made every day by any number of people and new voices. And when I understood that I didn't have to write "literature" in quotes, I was able to write what I knew.
This first happened when I was twenty-four, drunk, and living in a cottage on Cape Cod. One winter night it was freezing outside. I was alone, broke, I didn't have a television set, and I couldn't read because I'd had a few beers. And there, sitting beside my typewriter on the kitchen table, were the first ten pages of my novel, which I'd revised a million times, thereby rendering it completely dead. But with nothing else to do, I sat down at the table and dragged the typewriter and the pages toward me. I began with a new first sentence. I typed a few lines. Then, the instant I wrote something unsentimental, something that wasn't trying to be literature with a capital "L," I found what became my "voice."
Like Mentor, the beginning of my first novel came about by pure chance. But what I will say with regard to chance is that in order to take advantage of it, you have to be sitting in the chair at your desk, waiting. And that's where I was when Mentor arrived. I got lucky. But I was ready to work, and, after thirty years of writing, I had the tools to write the book I never expected to write, and yet, in the end, it changed my life.

AWP

Joe O'Connellwas a student in Tom Grimes's first writing workshop at Texas State University. His novel-in-stories Evacuation Plan (Dalton, 2007) was a finalist for the Violet Crown Book Award and won the North Texas Book Award. A film industry columnist for The Dallas Morning News, he teaches at St. Edward's University and Austin Community College.

from Mentor: A Memoir
by Tom Grimes
In my mid-twenties, I'd written a novel. Like most first novels, it evolved through a series of failures. I had no sense of form or struc-
ture. My sentences were imprecise. The characters and landscapes I described were difficult for a reader to see. And I didn't understand the difference between action and dramatic action.
I had another problem, too. I imitated authors. On Monday, I sounded like Vonnegut, who, on Tuesday, became Nabokov, who, on Wednesday, became Toni Morrison, who, on Thursday, became Philip Roth. My voice hadn't developed to the point where it was distinctive. And, repeatedly, I made the same mistake. I thought literature existed outside of me, that it was static rather than dynamic, that I had nothing new to add. If I couldn't write about debtors' prisons with Dickens's authority, I failed. If I couldn't outwit Jane Austen, I failed. If I couldn't philosophize like Bellow, I failed. For a year, my novel remained ten pathetic pages, each successive draft worse than its predecessor.
One night, I glanced at the scratched Formica table in my kitchen. On it, my blue electric typewriter nested beside a cracked sugar bowl, as if the machine might hatch a novel if it sat there long enough. Alongside it was the skimpy stack of pages I'd composed. Revising them had become brain-racking torture. Yet I wouldn't quit. So I walked to the table, pulled out one of its padded chairs, dragged the typewriter toward me, and reread the novel's opening paragraph for the thousandth time. Whatever life it once may have had, I'd wrung out of it. If a moment's authenticity had ever sung out from the page, I'd silenced it. I didn't believe the narrator's voice. I'd forced it. I'd sentimentalized my family. I didn't know the happy household on the page. My father's bitterness, my mother's theatrical self-pity, my sister marrying at nineteen, my brother deemed an idiot by all of us: that world I knew. I fetched a blank sheet of paper, fed it into the typewriter, drained my beer can, grabbed another, and waited. Five minutes passed. Then I pecked at the keys. After I read the words I'd tapped out, I obliterated them behind a scrim of xxxxxxxxxxx's. I tried again. And then, rather than gravitating toward sentimentality, I instead described the night my father crashed our car, drunk and doing ninety. I wrote until I passed out.
In the morning, I woke to find the pages scattered on the kitchen table. I brewed coffee. Then I poured some into a mug and lifted a page from the table. Habit prepared me to stop listening the moment my words sounded false, clumsy, and sickeningly meaningless. But, oddly, I was able to continue reading. I trusted the voice. I could imagine characters and places from the way the words had been strung together, as if by a stranger. I had a story to tell. Four years later, I had a novel.

Excerpted from Mentor: A Memoir by Tom Grimes.
Copyright © 2010 by Tom Grimes.
Used with permission from Tin House Books.