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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
How long did it take you to write? It's not your longest book, but you said it actually took the longest to complete.
The writing process can be very tedious one, and I'm not a big fan of publicity, to my publicist's dismay. I find it remarkable that I can make a living telling a story like this, but the process has its ups and downs just like any job.
I prefer to write in marathon fashion. I take a week or two off and lock myself in my apartment and sit down in front of the machine for 10 hours a day. "Slackjaw" took two weeks to finish, 10 days for "Nairobi Trio." But it didn't work out that way this time. I finished "Ruining It for Everybody" in 1999 or 2000 but then I had to go through a number of different editors and I wrote a novel, "The Buzzing," before it was finished.
My books are just about a bunch of stuff that happened. You look back and see them as independent incidents, but it takes a good editor to take what can be an incoherent mass of three or four dozen stories and see in them a larger theme that I would ignore or even deny myself. For example, my editor pointed out that "Slackjaw" was about moving toward blindness, which put the idea in my head and I began looking at the stories in a different way and trying to find something that flows and has a rhythm. Something indefinable.
The tone of "Ruining It for Everybody" seems much different from that of your previous two memoirs.
One of the things explored in the book is that I'm much calmer now than I used to be, and much less angry than I used to be. Of course, I can still be irked sometimes. I can be annoyed at times and frustrated. But I used to be riddled with this uncontrollable rage that came out in different ways. And it's just not there anymore for a variety of reasons. It burned itself out of me and I fell into a little rut. I just don't have that much to be pissed about.
But what distinguishes your memoirs from others is real, sometimes insurmountable crises. You suffer from retinitis pigmentosa [R.P.], you've had a serious brain lesion and seizures, you've attempted suicide and ended up in a mental ward.
I've heard that before, but I think a lot of things happen to a lot of people -- a lot of things happen to most people. It's a matter of looking at it the right way; I mean, you can do a 1,000-word story about something as simple as tripping on the curb -- and I have. There really is a story in everybody. This morning I heard a fellow describing Ronald Reagan as a man who looked at the world in terms of anecdotes and narratives. You sort of have to do that, to make a life interesting. That's how people are measured by others, by the stories we tell. You know, you talk to people in a bar and what do you do? You tell stories. It's just a matter of looking at everything from the proper angle. I think everybody's got it in them, I just happened to type 'em out.
When did you find out you had R.P.?
I always had bad vision, like 20/100, that was completely unrelated to R.P. But the R.P. first appeared at 11 or 12, when I could no longer see in dim restaurants or see at night. I didn't think there was anything strange about that -- I thought no one could see like that. I thought other people could read menus or stroll down the street at night because there was a trick that no one had shared with me. It wasn't until I was in my 20s -- I think I was 23 or 24 -- when I went in for a routine eye exam and the ophthalmologist told me what I had and told me that I was going to be blind in a few years.
It's a congenital condition. At my grandmother's funeral when I was about 12, my uncle came up to me and said, "You better start learning Braille now." I already had bad vision, and considering the family history he already suspected. He gave me a head's up long before any doctor did.
There's not much I can do about it. There's lots of research going on but nothing they can do now. There are lots of technological gizmos -- chips in eyes and electronic cameras -- but for people in their 70s or 80s. They're also working on gene therapy where they could correct the genetic problem, but they would only be able to do that on the youngest of infants. Neither works for me, so I just deal. Losing sight like this is a gradual, slow process. I was told that I'd be blind at 35 and I'm 39 now, so I got a little more time on them, but I have no idea when I'll go totally blind. One treatment is to take massive doses of vitamin A every day, which is supposed to slow the process while destroying your liver at the same time. So that's what I'm doing.
