Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [27]
“Jean-Joe, have you given that Ring Lardner I gave you a try yet?” Lardner’s book Haircut is a favorite of my father’s.
“My God, is that funny. Not a false note in it. Give it a try.”
The writers you were strongly discouraged from wasting your time on: Toni Morrison, anyone in the category of magical realism including Gabriel García Márquez and fantastic realism, Italo Calvino, historical fiction, Don DeLillo (“White Noise was absolute crap . . .”), Capote. Obviously anything inspirational was completely unacceptable, mass market anything, showing up to meet him for lunch with a John Grisham book under your arm would have been like showing up with no pants on, you know, get yourself together, for God’s sake. Not even discussed, it would be so ludicrous.
If I could have calmed down a little I might have been a reader, but I was not a great, devoted or thorough reader. I loved family drama like Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, adored comic greats like Molière, Wilde, the essays of Woody Allen. I always wanted to be well-read, but I wasn’t anywhere near well-read. Decently read, fantastically fakably read, motherfucking-lying-my-ass-off-to-your-face read. But it seemed like there was something more fun than books, like actual fun.
MY DAD HAD SPENT many years writing at five in the morning before he would go to work as a reporter at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, years when he had four babies under five years old, a mailman-mauling dog named Wordsworth, and our pony, Pepsi, in the backyard, whose manure he would shovel before heading out to work. But now he wasn’t getting up at five a.m. to write and he wasn’t heading off to a job. He seemed to be losing something essential to being a writer. Or already had. Maybe it was getting older. Maybe it was Mom’s drinking, which wasn’t what you’d call ladylike, maybe it was his own drinking, maybe he lost his confidence after his second novel didn’t sell. Dad wasn’t writing anymore. Not that anyone talked about this while it was daylight outside. Now that he wasn’t writing, it seemed like he talked about writing and books constantly, as if the fantasy was growing, had to grow if the reality was shrinking.
The first sign that he was no longer writing was he never mentioned submitting anything anymore, and then he wasn’t talking at dinner about things he was writing, and then he wasn’t even talking about things he was researching. He began talking about things he was going to write and this is pretty much where things stayed. Things he was going to write. At some future point. Until then, ideas went into tape recorders and file cabinets, all very carefully labeled, documented and organized.
I remember when we watched The Shining. The Torrances moved to that inn in Colorado so that Jack could work on his book, and then reality set in—the isolation—and the father went nuts. My mom groaned like a sick animal from the divan at the scene when Shelley Duvall sneaks into his writing room and peeks at his novel and sees that he has been typing “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” for months.
“Girls, turn it off. I can’t watch. I simply can’t watch,” Mom said.
Dad’s next project after his second novel, Black Ink, didn’t happen was Stylebook, a computer program built to run on your writing, to improve your writing grammatically and stylistically. It was a genius idea. In 1984. When he began it. But it was starting to drag on with no end in sight. My dad hired some high schooler in New Jersey to build the software for Stylebook, and this kid, whom he called “the kid,” ended up making tens of thousands of dollars working for my dad. He went off to college with every dime my dad scraped together and the program never ran properly. Some company offered my dad $300,000 for his research, but he felt this was peanuts compared