About The Author:
Jim
had, quite literally, done nothing in
his life other than finish his novel, a simple (if starkly boring) existence
that led to this author bio on the inside of the back cover of the book that
would go on to be a best seller:
About
the author:
Jim wrote this novel.
Jim,
seeing this in black and white for the first time when his advanced copies
arrived, felt as though it was wrong
and the wrongness leapt at him from the dustcover, stared at him in black and
white, again, quite literally.
About
the author:
Jim wrote this novel.
The truth, it is said, hurts, but this (unlike other things in
this story) is not literal.
The truth
does not stab or cut or slice or even punch you in the stomach like your older
brother did using your own hand – why you
hitting yourself?—although that is a fairly apt metaphor for what the truth
could do if it was physical. The truth,
instead, taunts. Or maybe haunts.
He
began to read other author bios, to see what they were up to – haunting bookstores and libraries, picking books
out at random. Romance novels, how-to
guides historical biographies of people he’d never heard of (and the irony of
looking in a biography for a much shorter biography, if it was irony, nobody’s
ever sure what irony is any more,
which itself might be ironic, if you think about it, and if irony means what
everybody thinks irony means, was lost
on him), and what he read amazed him:
…lives
in Vermont…
What
the heck was a Vermont? A house? A place? He wondered.
…has
a husband…
Jim
wondered if he should get one of those and where he might. Online?
…when not writing…
HUH?
…two
dogs, four children, and a parrot that thinks it’s people…
Which
sent him to the encyclopedia to figure out what a parrot might be and whether that might be a way to kill two birds
with one stone: get a ‘parrot that thinks
it’s people’ and a husband all at once.
He
was then embarrassed by his use of that old saying once he found out a parrot is a kind of bird.
This
grew discouraging. All these things and
people and places and he wasn’t even sure what was what!
“You’ve
never done anything?” his publisher asked him, when Jim phoned him to discuss
this. “I thought that author bio was
some sort of literary thing, you know, e
e cummings?”
“Who?”
Jim asked.
Jim
had by now finished his second novel, but refused to send it to his publisher
until he figured this thing out. He sat
up late one night, typing bio after bio:
Jim
spends his time, when not writing,
HUH?
Shark-hunting
off the coast of
He
had to look this up using Google™
Bora
Bora
And
(quite literally) 53 others, biographies that gave him a wife and a son and a
turtle, not necessarily in that order, and sometimes their names were
interchangeable so that the turtle was “Rita” in a few. Biographies that had him living in
California, and New York City, and Austin, Texas, and other places he picked
out of a map that he’d hung to his wall, a map that said it was of the “United States Of America,” a country Jim
sort of thought he lived in. Biographies
that gave him unusual hobbies: he was a numismatist,
a philatelist, he went herping,
stargazing, he collected taws and
Codd-neck bottles, he had once found
an entire T-Rex tooth on a trip to South Dakota with his now-estranged brother,
and as he wrote that one it didn’t bother him at all that neither the tooth,
nor the T-Rex, nor South Dakota, nor his now-estranged brother were things that
he wasn’t sure had ever existed.
He
grew increasingly despondent when he was not increasingly desperate. One day, standing in line at a fast-food
restaurant
The
author enjoys a cheeseburger now and then but does not care for French fries.
However, the restaurant he goes to most frequently out of habit does not serve
onion rings, and for some reason the author never goes to the other restaurant,
which is not so far away
he
stared at the cashier, a girl or woman who appeared to be just about 18 years
old. He wondered if she would be his
daughter – she was probably too young to be a girlfriend or wife – and wondered
if she had a boyfriend that perhaps he could go into business with on the side?
The
author makes log cabins with his son-in-law, when not writing.
But
he couldn’t bring himself to ask her that (even though he was very very close
to doing just that “Will there be
anything else?” she’d smiled and he’d almost said “Yeah, do you have a boyfriend who you are going to marry and does he
build log cabins?” before he’d said “An
apple pie, please.”)
He
asked his publisher what that man did on the weekends, what life he had,
whether he had ever entered an equestrian competition and finished fourth but
was pleased to have just competed?
“I
think you need to get out more,” the man had said, cryptically, on the other
end of the phone from whatever place he lived in that Jim didn’t really believe
could exist.
The
author once stayed outside for 17 consecutive days, eating pizza he had
delivered from time-to-time and drinking rainwater.
He
didn’t learn anything and didn’t really feel the experience was valuable.
Pumping
gas one morning he saw a beautiful woman and darted over to her.
“Marry
me,” he said.
“Excuse
me?” she answered, backing away slightly.
“Marry
me,” Jim told her. “Marry me and move
with me to an abandoned ski chalet in Boulder, which we will remodel to serve
as a home for our two children, a daughter named Marie because she was born in France where you studied life
drawing, and a son named Brady
because he was my favorite quarterback as a kid. Marry me and honeymoon with me on the Amazon
river in Brazil, where you will be bitten by a snake and have to be airlifted
out but you will survive and will have joked on the helicopter that this will
make for a great toast at our fiftieth wedding anniversary. Marry me and insist that we rescue the pets
nobody wants, an entire floor of our house devoted to iguanas and tarantulas
and Madagascar hissing cockroaches. We
will together enjoy cooking meals for your extended family, or sometimes travel
to our beach house in Malibu, or simply live on the farm where you grew up in
Kansas.”
“I
think you need some help,” the woman said, not unkindly.
The
End.
About
the author: The author’s whereabouts are currently unknown. He was last seen running into an airport, hand-in-hand
with an exceedingly attractive woman who, it must be said, regarded him
with an expression of equal parts disbelief and amusement. They were carrying
several bags of marbles and clutching a brochure that said something about the
South of France. His next book may never
come out.
2 comments:
I'm really interested in what his novels are about. I mean, he didn't know what Vermont is? Or a husband? Yes, I'm very interested in this man's novels.
The story I just read here though, that was pretty great.
What, you think a guy can't just make up a story and write about it without having experienced something?
I think you're forgetting a little somebody named "F. Scott Fitzgerald." Although it's not generally known, F. Scott (or "Effsy," as his friends called him), existed in limbo for the first 1/3 of his life, during which time he wrote "The Great Gatsby." Originally, the book was intended simply as an homage to Wagner's "The Ring Cycle," although admittedly the references were somewhat oblique, as F. Scott had never heard of "The Ring Cycle" and was unaware of its existence.
It's all right there in Wikipedia.
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