Start at the beginning of the Story of DANOTI here.

Go to Part IV here.

Those indie CD packages of Wheelie sent by our band to the folks in the industry did their jobs.

Because of them, professional people in the music industry contacted us. We were invited to play music festivals. We won a nationwide battle of the bands contest. With the help of these avenues, we landed a record deal with a major label. We were guaranteed two albums to be promoted at the national level. We were given cash up front and tour support, which meant we would tour the country and perhaps beyond. We would have a shot at hit singles and MTV coverage.

This was the holy grail of rock band achievement at the time. I couldn’t believe my luck. Every band I’d ever appreciated in my life had come to me via a record deal. It was what every musician at the time strove for and few achieved. The great bands out of Tempe—Gin Blossoms, Dead Hot Workshop—had achieved it. My band was next.

That said, getting a record deal also felt inevitable. People had liked us and our music since our first gig. There was a crazed element to our ascension in Tempe. We were a rock foursome made up of guys in our mid 20s at a time when these types of bands were getting signed and seemingly doing well for themselves on the national stage. A dream of mine was coming true. We’d already been scraping by in Tempe. This record deal would catapult us further.

The band would make and release those two guaranteed albums, one in 1996, another in 1997. We would tour the country several times over those years — in a van, then in a bus. Our music would climb singles and album charts. Our faces would appear on MTV with regularity for a short period. During the summer of 1996, the Refreshments sold at least 10,000 copies per week of our first album for five weeks in a row. It was the album sales pinnacle of the band’s career.

We even managed to appear live on NBC’s Late Night with Conan O’Brien. This was a huge deal. Late night TV was something I’d watched for decades. I’d spent the latter half of my high school years staying up way too late to watch Late Night with David Letterman and sleeping in the next morning to the point I often had to skip taking a shower before going to class. About a year before our first album came out, Letterman and NBC had had a breakup, leading to Dave’s departure from the station. That left a gaping hole in the host seat of Late Night, and the network filled it with Conan O’Brien.

At the time, I was not a watcher of Conan’s show. This had something to do with my loyalty to Letterman, but I liked that Conan was publicly trying to take over for this giant of late night TV—to the point that his struggles filling Letterman’s shoes became part of his schtick. Importantly, Conan and not Letterman wanted the Refreshments to play on his show, so I thought Conan was all right.

For the show, we would play “Banditos” live for a studio audience. The performance had me focused on one thing: Don’t screw up. As I understood it, there was no such thing as an instance in which a band would be allowed to re-record its segment. Get it right the first time or prepare to live with your mistake(s) forever. The Refreshments of course had been playing “Banditos” every day for years, so I was optimistic. Even my backing vocals on the song—which were more of a whisper than full-throated singing—should be fine. As I saw it, we were ready for our close-up.

Playing on late night TV feels like the big time. You get a soundcheck, where you run through your song exactly once, then you play the same song exactly once for the studio audience while tape is rolling. This was an environment the Refreshments were built for. Everyone in the band was focused on nailing “Banditos” for the show. The Gin Blossoms already had an impressive late night TV performance history. Lead singer Robin Wilson once wore a Dead Hot Workshop t-shirt while performing with the band on Letterman. That was the coolest gesture I could’ve imagined. We wanted to continue that Tempe tradition and join the ranks of our local heroes—and maybe get some attention beyond.

At soundcheck, Conan sat at his desk and went through the motions of introducing us, and we played “Banditos” for no one but the cameras. Conan came over after we finished. He shook my hand, looked me in the eye, and said, “Sorry you couldn’t be on Letterman.” I liked him even more.

Playing “Banditos” for the live audience went by fast. There was the moment we were waiting backstage to play, the moment we were summoned to the stage and my nerves started doing their thing, the moment I was standing there onstage with my bass, impatiently waiting for what I guess was the time set aside for the commercial break to expire and for the Go light to come on, and the moment the Go light came on. Conan introduced us, and I felt my bass strings under my fingers, which reminded me that I was no longer a vessel of impatient waiting but a guy who knew how to do this.

I’m sure playing the song actually happened—there’s a YouTube video to prove it—but the performance felt like it lasted about fifteen seconds. Still, during that fifteen seconds, I felt something of the Refreshments vibe come through—especially during the solo out—and the four of us rejoiced a bit backstage before heading to the hotel to watch our performance as it came on “live” later that night.

I managed not to beat myself up too much over the performance. Watching it in my hotel room, my bass playing was spot on, and my backing vocals—where I was most vulnerable to gaffs—made me flinch only once. Still, for me, there’s one element of my performance that stands out.

Somewhere around the two-minute mark, during the second pre-chorus, the camera focuses on Roger, and I come out of nowhere from his right and do this shuck-and-jive move that, shall we say, isn’t quite TV ready. The moment jumped out at me. What the hell was I doing? From the point of view of the camera, it comes across looking like I’m trying to do some kind of Chuck Berry move, but in a normal concert setting—where I was used to performing—its effect is more front-of-the-stage-to-back—or at least that what I’d assumed. It looked strange.

No one in the band mentioned the move the next day, but I don’t doubt they noticed. Nothing dire ever happened because of the move, save for it punctuating my 15 minutes of TV fame. If anyone remembers me from my very, very few moments on TV, it’s probably what they remember.

Today, I have mixed feelings about the moment. On the one hand, it embarrasses me. I see myself as others might see me, and let’s just say there’s not much Elvis there. On the other hand, I kind of like that the guy on TV comes off like he doesn’t much give much of a damn what others think—even though he did. He’s not quite ready for TV, and that has its value.

Perhaps most damning, I recognize myself in the move, something about who I am—the way I look, the way I act—that I wouldn’t have had access to otherwise. In short, I’m a bit nonplussed by the guy, but I can’t help but like him a little bit. There are definitely worse people on the planet. Anyway, the clip is out there if you want to see it.

Hence, 1996 brought the fulfillment of the rock and roll dream, and even a live TV appearance. We also played live all over the country and made a decent living. Our biggest success, however, was still coming.

Tune in next month for Part VI.

My first memoir My Iliad Odyssey is available now. Order here.

Read the Story of DANOTI Part III here.

Start at the beginning of the Story of DANOTI here.

The Refreshments started playing our originals in Tempe clubs in early 1994. During an early gig at Long Wong’s, maybe six weeks after our Tempe debut, I noted the overflow crowd, and I could feel something of their intense interest. It was starting to be obvious that we weren’t just another Tempe band, that something was happening around the Refreshments that was distinct. As we started our song “Suckerpunch,” the P.A. system malfunctioned. Roger’s and Dusty’s voices abruptly disappeared from our monitors, but the singing didn’t stop. The room of 100 or so early fans sang the words back at us. There was nowhere for these people to pick up the lyrics but at one of our shows, and they’d already learned this one. It was shocking to hear, and about as pleasant as anything that might happen while playing in a band.

With interest in us growing, we knew we had to make an album. The Gin Blossoms had managed to record and release an album locally. No record label, just make it and sell it from the lip of the stage. That was our next step.

We didn’t make much money from those early gigs, so we couldn’t afford normal studio rates. Luckily, Don Salter, who owned the Saltmine recording studio in Mesa, was willing to offer a discounted price to get us in the door. The only caveat was that we had to record during the wee hours of the morning, from midnight to whenever, after the full-priced customers had left for the day.

While recording Wheelie at the Saltmine, we built a beer can pyramid on the pane of the console window, which became known as “the beeramid.” It was maybe 20 or 30 cans in all, and it got to the point that engineer Mark Matson couldn’t see us from the soundboard. That was fine. In the bosom of this alcohol-soaked era, we weren’t up for much guidance. We spent maybe a half-dozen late nights at the Saltmine drinking, recording, and mixing, and we finished the album by the end of the summer.

December 4^th, 1994, represents the greatest triumph of my music business career.

On that Sunday night, I took a box of 200 Wheelies to the Yucca Tap Room. I’d set up my bass rig earlier that day so I wouldn’t be encumbered with it during our CD release party. I’d had the back booth of the Yucca Tap Room reserved as a merch booth, and I walked through the early crowd of 75 or so with our box of CDs in tow.

I’ll never forget the feeling of 75 sets of eyes following me as I walked through the room. By the time I sat down, a line had formed from my booth all the way to the other end of the room. The first guy in line dropped a stack of bills on the table and said, “Give me 15.”

I don’t care how accomplished the Refreshments became after that. You can point to Mercury Records, “Banditos,” King of the Hill, whatever. Nothing ever felt more successful to me than walking through that room with all those eyes following me, sitting at that booth, and having the first guy drop a handful of bills on the table and say, “Give me 15.” We wound up selling 410 copies of our CD that night, in a club that held no more than 200 people. I’d had to run home during the band’s break to get another box.

The CD didn’t lead to any substantial income for the band. We didn’t charge enough for the album, and we gave away too many, but it was for sale at our shows and local record stores.

Importantly, the CD didn’t just sit there. They sold. The album served as a tool for keeping our fans engaged even when they weren’t seeing us play, and it was the perfect calling card for packages sent to folks in the music industry. In an immediate sense, it didn’t matter if the professionals who received those packages liked our album. We were an original musical outfit that played gigs, made and sold albums, and kept ourselves afloat without day jobs. No TV, no radio, no record label, and still we managed some semblance of a living. Times had changed since I’d watched Van Halen on MTV and wondered how to achieve such a life. A little band like ours could get a small foothold in the world. And who knew? Maybe we could be the next Gin Blossoms, or band that played original music in Tempe and got signed to a major label. Anything was possible.

Tune in next month for Part V.

My first memoir My Iliad Odyssey is available now. Order here.

Start at the beginning of the Story of DANOTI here.

So far with this article series, we’ve established that:

-Growing up, I associated making a living in the arts and entertainment with being on TV.

-After I moved to Tempe, AZ, in 1990, there was a band called the Gin Blossoms that made a living playing local clubs and were not on TV.

In early 1993, I was in an original threesome called the Hanson Brothers with singer/guitarist Jim Gerke and drummer Dusty Denham. The Hansons rarely gigged. We scheduled rehearsals here and there, but sometimes this or that member didn’t show up, which left the other two to jam alone. During one Jim-less session, Dusty mentioned that the singer of his old band the Mortals had just gotten back from a gap year in Taipei, Taiwan, and was looking to jam.

I knew of Roger Clyne. I’d seen the Mortals maybe a half dozen times from 1990-1992. They played some of the same venues as the Solemines during that era—the Sun Club, Chuy’s, Edcel’s Attic. I remember one summer the Mortals played the Sun Club seemingly every Tuesday night, and I found myself in their small audience here and there. I liked the band. Dusty’s drumming was appealing, and their bass player Greg Cullar—really tall—had a way of moving while he played that was mesmerizing, the low Sun Club stage just above his head. These two alone were worth the two bucks paid at the door.

Roger was more of an enigma. He was handsome, and he sang and played guitar with his eyes closed in a desperate, plaintive way. Something about his delivery was more ‘80s new wave than ‘90s Tempe. I knew from somewhere that Roger was the songwriter of the band, and I liked many of his songs. I can still sing “Monsters” and “Unlisted” in my head. Still, the band tended to play the same parts over and over, making what might’ve been a good three-minute song into a more boring five-minute song. Also, they could’ve used a lead instrument.

I told Dusty we had a lead singer, Jim.

Still, the idea of playing with Roger persisted. Whenever Jim missed a Hansons practice, Dusty suggested we jam with Roger, and every time I quashed the idea. I knew Roger had something more than a typical lead singer—something that might help a band succeed in Tempe—but I also couldn’t quite see myself in a band with him.

In the intervening days and weeks, I churned on the idea of trying Roger out. I’d turned down the opportunity to play with Doug Hopkins. What was I waiting for?

The next time Jim missed a practice, Dusty suggested we call Roger, and I acquiesced. At least we’d jam as a full band that night.

On the day of Roger’s tryout, Dusty and I had a 12-pack of Budweiser on its end in the middle of the room, ready for our greedy hands. It would become a tradition. For the first year or two, I don’t think we ever had a rehearsal that didn’t involve an upturned 12-pack.

Roger arrived to Dusty’s basement with his guitar case in one hand and amp in the other. He was weirdly bashful upon meeting me, avoiding a direct gaze. I knew he was familiar with Dusty’s basement since it was where his and Dusty’s previous band the Mortals had rehearsed. He set his amp down in front of Jim’s Marshall, and I tried to ignore the symbolism.

The three of us managed small talk as we drank and got our equipment ready. I learned that Roger—who’d recently arrived home from an extended stay in southeast Asia—was fluent in Spanish, and he’d spent a semester of his college years in Mexico. I wondered how that happened, why someone would choose southeast Asia. Three years before—as a 21-year-old—I’d taken my first ever plane flight. Solemines guitarist Tim Anthonise and I had flown from Phoenix to Los Angeles to play our first and only non-Arizona show—at Tim’s dad’s house in Orange Country for Tim’s dad’s birthday. My idea of exotic travel to that point had been driving my Omni 024 from my hometown of Moline, IL, to Phoenix. Roger might as well have been from another planet.

Once playing our instruments, our awkwardness translated into a lively vibe. I liked the Mortals tunes we played–-“Psychosis” and “Girly” among them—and a Hanson Brothers song I’d written called “Carefree” had a great feel with these guys. The chorus went:

I can take care of everything.
And I can pick for you the songs that you sing
And the sites you see. No, don’t mind me.
I’m carefree.

And I will always keep the upper hand.
And I can change your angry young man
Into a fashion show, with brand name clothes
And carefree.

There isn’t a ton of logic to those lyrics. They were more or less what had come out when I’d written the song a year or two earlier for the Hanson Brothers. In retrospect, it’s hard for me not to see how this attitude within me—letting someone else drive so long as I could remain carefree—set me up for some of the disappointment I would later feel during the Refreshments’ career. At the time, I was just going along with it.

I definitely sensed our threesome had something—I didn’t know what, but “fresh” is what I wanted to call it. Unfortunately, about an hour into the jam, I broke a bass string, and without a spare set, that pretty much meant the jam was over.

Not as far as Roger was concerned. He took off his guitar, took my bass, uncoiled the broken string and—Leatherman at the ready—went to work. He managed to tie my broken string into a knot at the bridge, getting it to hold tenuously in place.

I was charmed by the gesture. Here was a guy who so dug our first collaboration he was willing to do anything to keep it going, even tie a knot in a broken bass string. It made the event feel special somehow. We weren’t just starting a band, like I had many times before. We were starting a story, a legend: three guys who would do anything to keep playing together, even tie a knot in a broken bass string. I knew the knot wouldn’t hold—it would snap within the first few bars of our next song—but that didn’t matter. The story of that jam was what mattered, the experience of trying to keep the damn thing going no matter what. If a bass string had broken during a Hanson Brothers practice, no one would’ve thought twice about calling it a day.

My bass out of commission, all that was left to do was finish the 12-pack. The three of us chatted in Dusty’s mom’s driveway about music. I discovered Roger and I were both big Camper Van Beethoven fans, and he was interested in playing me songs by the Specials and the Pogues—both bands something of traveling companions from his time in southeast Asia. As our chat wound down, Roger spoke more quickly, seemingly hoping to gain my approval, like he was applying for a job he wanted, which I guess he was. Roger was a talented singer, a compelling songwriter, and a kind of AZ character to boot. Dusty and I would’ve been fools not to ask him aboard.

It’s hard for me not to notice in that first jam a microcosm of the Refreshments’ entire trajectory: Roger’s shyness combined with his need to impress, my curiosity tinged with incredulity, the necessity of alcohol to get past our disconnect, the creation of the best rock music we’d ever made.

Then the breaking of my bass string, Roger’s struggle to fix it, the final unravelling, the plundering of the 12-pack. Everything that would happen in our band over the next five years was right there.

Go to Part IV here.

My first memoir My Iliad Odyssey is available now. Order here.

It started with “Laugh About It Later.”

It continued with “DANOTI.”

I finished earlier this year with “Play The Game (Just A Little)”

I promised another album, which would include all three of those tracks plus seven more.

The day (before yesterday) has arrived!

Big change from last time: You can buy The Day Before Yesterday as a AS A PHYSICAL CD!

Yep, I got it together enough to have CDs this time. If you want a physical copy of my new album, I got you covered.

Don’t worry. You can always get the music as an mp3 download at Bandcamp. Oh, by the way, today is Bandcamp Friday. That means that, if you buy the mp3s via Bandcamp today, all of the proceeds go to me and my fellow writer/musicians Bret Hartley and Kevin Leahy. So, buy today!

If to this point you missed getting either of my previous albums, Branches Breaking from the Weight and The Brightness of an Ordinary Star—which have come out only as mp3s at Bandcamp—today’s a good day to buy all three! You want new music in your life!

That said, it feels great to have physical product again. Buy with confidence!

Lastly, I’ll be playing one of the tracks from my new album at my live stream today! I play lots of Art Edwards oldies, too. It all goes down at 4 PM PST! Stop by and listen to some tunes! It’s fun and easy.

In January 1990, I moved to Phoenix, AZ, to live with my friend Randy, who’d offered me a place to sleep if I split rent with him. A.S.U. was in nearby Tempe, where I could finish college, and my friend assured me there was a music scene in Tempe that featured bands playing original music. Those were the two ingredients I needed. Phoenix became the place.

As luck would have it, the Tempe original music scene was just getting hot when I arrived. The Gin Blossoms had signed a record contract after a year or two of playing clubs in town, and rumor had it that each member made $200 per local show. One show per week meant $800 per month. I could live on that. Here was another avenue to make a living playing original music, and a way accomplished in very close proximity to where I now lived. The right original band could play gigs in Tempe and scrape by.

Importantly, the guys in the Blossoms weren’t overly glamorous like the guys in Van Halen, and they also weren’t overly artistic like the guys in R.E.M. They wore band T-shirts and flannel and blue jeans. Maybe one or two would wear a cowboy hat, but no one mistook them for country. They were more like me. The world of the professional local musician was moving away from TV and closer to me, and I did what I could to move closer to it.

During my prime live-music-attending window—1990-1992—I saw the Blossoms as often as possible. In fact, for my 21^st birthday, I saw at the Asylum a double bill of Dead Hot Workshop leading off for the Gin Blossoms. At that show, I drunkenly declared my new Tempe band the Solemines better than both Dead Hot and the Blossoms. I was drunken fool. Dead Hot had a genuine songwriting genius, and the Gin Blossoms were the best band in Tempe to the vast majority of those who cared about such things.

The Blossoms were the band the Solemines watched, admired, tried to emulate. They’d released a local album Dusted, which Solemines lead singer Jim owned but was out of print by the time I got to Tempe. Also around the time I got to Tempe, the Blossoms signed their national record deal with A&M Records. They were going to make a big-time album, tour the country, make a living, maybe even be on TV. They had a shot at being like KISS, Van Halen, or R.E.M. In short, the Solemines—myself included—wanted to follow the path of the Gin Blossoms.

Despite the tortured nature of much of their material, from my vantage as a guy who was trying to succeed, there was nothing difficult about being in the Gin Blossoms. Every time they played Long Wong’s or the Sun Club or Chuy’s, it was like an early 90s Phoenix version of what going to the Cavern Club in Liverpool must’ve been like in the early 60s. The five Blossoms played tunes that made you want to dance and drink and sing along. They knew how to entertain, mixing in songs like “Theme from The Jeffersons” with their original music. They seemed completely within their element onstage, banging out their infectious pop rock for the throng with a certain insouciance, like they could screw up at any moment and somehow it wouldn’t matter. Even after the Refreshments signed with Mercury Records and toured as the Blossoms’ leadoff act, I remained a in awe of them. For me, to be young and drunk and in love meant going to see the Gin Blossoms on Friday night and trying not to get pulled over on the way home.

By 1991, the entire rock world got turned on its head by grunge music. Bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam were everyman types who made loud, angry music that was also very popular. More jeans, more flannel, more rock T-shirts. MTV featured these guys acting like themselves, and I saw a world in which I could fit. You didn’t have to be six feet tall, have teased hair, and wear spandex, but you also didn’t have to dress like an artist. You could just be you, by which I meant me.

If in 1991 the Solemines could draw 100 people as a headliner on a weekend night, the Gin Blossoms could draw 300. We wanted to lead off for the Blossoms as much as possible. We didn’t make as much money as their leadoff act ($75), but their shows always felt more alive.

I was amazed by the penchant of the Blossoms’ audience to dance. Every song of the Blossoms’ set featured a full dance floor where people drank beer and gave it their all.

Despite this penchant, they crowd meticulously avoided the dance floor during Solemines’ opening sets. When we led off for the Blossoms—which tended to be at the Sun Club—the mass of attendees were like ants, scurrying around the bar and tables, milling in an unconscious way but in a way seemingly instinctually known to them, and this instinct kept them deliberately from that 15- by 20-foot square of hardwood right in front of us. It was embarrassing. Our girlfriends would eventually grace this portion of the room, which made the starkness less noticeable, but it rarely prompted others to join. We played our grooviest 45 minute set, doing everything we could to get people to come forward and shake their hips, but it never happened. After we finished our set, the Blossoms hit the stage and the dance floor filled from the first note. It was simple: they had it, and we didn’t. Something had to change. In mid-1991, the Solemines broke up.

In their working-class Arizona way, the Gin Blossoms strutted around town like rock stars, and their biggest star—though I was in awe of all of them—was Doug Hopkins.

Doug was the band’s lead guitarist, chief songwriter, most iconic member. Doug was tall and lean, wore an old flannel shirt and jeans, and had rock star charisma. Anybody who saw the Blossoms back then were struck by Doug’s stage presence, which included his distinctive way of strutting from the back of the stage to the front, swaying like a boat on the wave of music, playing licks on his Les Paul, and reacting during accents with a trademark arm fling and Townsend-esque kick. Doug was not a shoe-gazer—a monicker we in the Solemines took great pains to avoid. He didn’t just stand there and play. He made a spectacle. Doug was an entertainer in the sense that you immediately noticed him from the time he walked onstage.

Doug was also the Blossom’s most outspoken wit. Despite not singing himself, he was notorious for grabbing the mic in between songs and offering a rejoinder to something one of the other members might’ve said or in response to an audience member. His nasally voice—running somewhat contrary to his tall frame—was the perfect vehicle for his sardonic comments, his lovable grouchiness.

One of his most famous vocal contributions occurred when the band broke into an impromptu version of “Why Must I be a Teenager in Love?” The band slowed down in the middle of the song, creating a quiet, jazzy exploration. Doug took the opportunity to grab the mic: “Would someone in the name of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph tell why I must be a fucking teenager in love?” I weirdly admired his jaundiced outlook; his well-spoken, oddly unmusical cadence. Such seemingly ad-libbed moments were a highlight of any Blossoms show.

By 1992, the Gin Blossoms had thrown out Hopkins, whose depression and addiction threatened to hamstring the band as its debut album New Miserable Experience was set for nationwide release. The album was fueled by Doug’s songs such as “Hey Jealousy” and “Found Out About You,” what would become their two biggest hits. It wouldn’t be long before Doug was permanently perched on a bar stool at Long Wong’s, complaining to anyone who would listen about his treatment by the band.

Every once in a while, old Solemines lead singer Jim and I met at Long Wong’s for beer and wings. Once, we even scared up the courage to approach Doug.

Doug had taken to sitting on the wooden box positioned just outside the main door, smoking a cigarette and drinking a longneck. The Blossoms’ tunes were just starting to surface on the radio, and it was known that Doug was surly about it. There was a quote or two in the local alt weekly the New Times about his inability to listen to his own songs when they came on the radio. After a few beers, Jim and I started a conversation with him, and as closing time approached, the three of us hiked back to former Solemine Tim’s and my apartment to jam.

Jim and I exchanged glances of delight as we strolled with our hero to our drunken jam session. Would the three of us start a band together? I didn’t know, and drunk as I was, I didn’t care. I was just enjoying this brush with Tempe music greatness and the chance to play a little with him.

“Do you have a guitar?” Doug asked.

“No,” I said, “but my roommate Tim does.”

Doug seemed to flinch. “I’m not sure he likes me.”

This astounded me. Tim adored Doug. He was a hero to all of us. How could Doug not know that? “Tim’s at his girlfriend’s,” I said, though if he’d been there, he’d have likely joined in.

Once at my place, the three of us congregated in the living room. We broke out Tim’s Les Paul, and Doug played us a song he’d been working on. It was song about a girl named Bobbi who was “already two weeks late.” The tune seemed more serious than his Blossoms songs, but I was excited to get to hear it. Jim, however, passed out, leaving our ersatz threesome singer-less.

I grabbed a pen and pad and proceeded to come up with the quickest second verse I could, playing off the idea of Bobbi’s pregnancy. When I finished, I handed Doug the pad.

Doug glanced over the lyrics, shrugged and said, “That’s cool. I could go with that.” I knew the guys in the Blossoms typically wrote songs by themselves. Co-writing wasn’t necessarily something Doug was open to, but I guess I didn’t give him a choice.

We hung out some more, played a record or two. Jim snored on the couch. With nothing else to do, Doug left, and that was that.

Shortly after Doug’s visit, in the spring of 1992, I moved out of Tim’s and my apartment to live with my future wife Kel in her one-bedroom by the railroad tracks. Her place was a short bike ride from A.S.U., where we both attended classes. A truckload of musical equipment and CDs from my apartment made it official. We spent the next two years working bad jobs, writing essays for English classes, and going to the occasional Gin Blossoms or Dead Hot show.

The move also represented a clean break from my past in the Solemines. No longer Tim’s roommate, if I were going to find a way forward in the Tempe scene, now was the time. Despite being a free agent, my participation in band life was sporadic. I knew other musicians in town, but they were either in bands or I wasn’t really that interested in playing with them. I had to make something happen, but I didn’t know how.

Almost as a cosmic answer to this question, I found on the ground a pair of tickets to the Dead Milkman show at After the Gold Rush that night—a 1,000-seater close to Kel’s and my apartment on Apache. I’m making this sound more magical then it was. There were a lot of these tickets on the ground in front of the venue. I suspected the club owners, not satisfied by the number of tickets sold, scattered them as a way to fill the room.

I recruited Randy, my old roommate, and the two of us made a night of going to see the Dead Milkmen. We’d both always liked the band. I had a few of their cassettes and listened to them as I threw newspapers, which was my day job at the time.

Once at the show, we both drank beer on the middle concourse—at roughly eye level with the Milkmen but a ways back. The pit churned with slam dancers in front of us, aggressive young men making weirdly deliberate movements and occasionally throwing themselves at each other. I knew this was where my musclemen friends from high school would’ve congregated had they been at the show. Despite my love of punk music, I’d never had the courage to slam dance. I just plain wasn’t tough enough.

That was my problem, I decided. I needed to scare up some courage. The Blossoms, while hardly slam dance types, seemed braver, more devil-may-care, than me. I needed to break out of myself. I would never get to where I wanted to go otherwise.

I turned, and just on the other side of the concourse was Doug Hopkins.

He stood smoking a cigarette and holding a longneck, and he had one boot flat against the wall behind him. I took this fortuitous sighting as a new chance to impress him. Before I could talk myself out of it, I walked right up to him and tapped him on the shoulder.

“I’m your new bass player,” I yelled above the din.

He looked at me incredulously, then seemed to recognize me as seriousness. I didn’t know if I was. With no other band on the horizon, I’m sure I was just trying the idea on. With a few beers in me, it felt like the right thing to say.

He motioned with his head for me to follow him. He led me to the lobby and stopped briefly next to a roped-off stairwell leading up. People milled about. The bar teemed with a few people apparently not interested in the band. Doug looked both ways, threw a leg over the rope, and scurried up the stairwell. I threw a leg over, followed him.

We found ourselves in a dark catbird’s seat. A window was cut into one wall, which looked down towards the stage. It was the perfect place to watch the show. No doubt club employees hung out up here. I wondered if Doug knew of this place or if he’d just gotten lucky.

Doug squatted, sat against a wall, and I did the same. He took a swig from his longneck.

“What do you think of the band?” I said. The Milkmen blared away below us.

He blinked a few times. “They’re fine, I guess. Frankly, you’d think after ten years they’d learn how to play.”

I laughed.

“So, we’re playing an E chord, right,” he said, “and you slide up to the G sharp.”

“The third,” I said.

“What?” he said. The band was loud.

“A third to the E.”

“Motherfucker,” Doug said. “Jesse wouldn’t know a third if it came cascading out of his ass.”

I laughed again. Jesse was Jesse Valenzuela, the Blossoms’ rhythm guitarist and another songwriter. I’d always liked Jesse and his songs, but I also liked hearing Doug complain about him.

The encounter wound down from there. I gave Doug my phone number, and he agreed to keep me posted if he ever needed a bass player.

Within a month or two, I got a call from him. “I’m starting something with the Zubia Brothers,” he said. “Are you interested?” The Zubia brothers were Lawrence (lead singer) and Mark (guitarist, background singer) Zubia. I knew both. The pair had started in the Tempe scene roughly at the same time as the Solemines.

I knew this new band was going to be a big deal in Tempe, Doug Hopkins’s first new act after the Blossoms. There would be Friday night gigs at places like Long Wong’s, the Sun Club, Chuy’s—maybe even Hayden Square, the outdoor area that served as a kind of open space between some clubs and other businesses in town. When bands played Hayden Square, as many as a thousand people could attend. If I joined this band, I would be starting back in the Tempe scene at a level higher than the Solemines had ever ascended. If I wanted a new opportunity, here it was.

Instead, I mumbled something about my full schedule at A.S.U., how if I didn’t buckle down I’d never finish college, how it might not be the right time for me.

Why did I turn him down?

My main aversion to the idea of joining Doug’s band centered the thought of how difficult it would’ve been to have any kind of impact. As far back as Illinois, I never felt like a secondary member of any band in which I played. I was always involved in songwriting, recording, coming up with band concepts. I admired egalitarian bands like R.E.M., where it seemed every member received the dignity of being a songwriter and important contributor. I knew there were plenty of bands led by one person, and this idea never sat well with me. In any band I committed to, it was necessary for me to have some kind of voice, and in Doug’s new band, I couldn’t imagine that. I’d just wind up as Doug’s bass player, and that wasn’t enough. I had no plan, but I had ambitions that extended beyond that.

After a long pause, Doug said, “Well, if it means anything to you, this group of guys wanted to call you first.”

“It does.”

And he hung up.

With no hope for another band on the horizon, I needed help paying the rent. I tried and failed at many jobs. Over the course of 1993, in the midst of a recession, I acquired and gave up six different jobs. I was a telemarketer for three different companies. I assisted some guy in his carpet cleaning business. I proofread Who’s Who books. I didn’t hold any of these jobs for long—I wasn’t fired from any of them, I just eventually found them intolerable and quit. I felt certain that the world couldn’t be so cruel as to expect me to go to one of these places and perform these tasks every day for the rest of my life.

Despite my interest in books and my pursuit of an English degree, I couldn’t really envision a path as a writer. I didn’t expect to go into teaching. I don’t know what I expected to do. Finishing college—which was approaching that December—was the end of my plan.

During the latter half of 1993, with the help of local and national scenes that found down-to-earth types appealing, I helped form a band that did more or less the same thing as the Gin Blossoms in Tempe.

Got to Part III here.

Read the first book ever published by D.A.N.O.T.I.

If, as child, I saw you on TV, that meant you were, at minimum, someone who made enough money to pay your bills. “Mikey” was someone who no doubt made money for his groundbreaking appearance in the Life cereal commercial. The lady in the Calgon commercial who said, “My husband, some hot shot” was doing just fine in her chosen profession. The man who yelled “Midasize it” from his truck to a passing car was making getting by as well. It didn’t matter that I, a working-class kid in the working class-town of Moline, IL, had no idea how or how much people on TV were paid. I repeated their slogans at school. How could that not lead to some kind of financial reward for them? If I knew one thing, it was that famous people were not like me, and that famous people made money.

And surely the people who occupied the actual television shows of my childhood were doing just fine. The actors of the characters Jack, Janet, and Chrissy were no doubt remunerated for their starring roles in Three’s Company. Ron Howard and Henry Winkler were well known for their roles as Richie Cunningham and the Fonz, respectively, in Happy Days, and their bank accounts must have been the better for it. Evil Kneivel; Gene, Gene the Dancing Machine; anybody on the Love Boat, these were people succeeding in the entertainment field, and that meant to me they were being paid for it, and probably paid well.

While I wasn’t much of a reader as a kid, I recognized a similar level of success in some of the authors of the day. Danielle Steel, Stephen King, Judith Krantz. These were novelists even I knew about, and they were clearly making money from their efforts, if not life-changing money. They were household names. They had movies made from their books. They were mentioned by people on TV as important authors who sold millions of copies and probably had lots of money. If I—a teenager who had never read a novel for pleasure and barely made it through The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 10^th grade English class—knew about them, they were famous. Getting to the point that you were on TV, or mentioned on TV, meant you were a professional in the entertainment field who, at minimum, kept the bills paid.

The music business was the part of the industry I was most enamored with, especially as a teenager. I was a budding bass player who loved heavy metal and would alter my life to go and see Van Halen or Def Leppard or the Scorpions in concert. These acts came to me via TV as much as radio, with the newly-minted MTV featuring their videos and interviews. These rock stars lived the greatest of lives, from my vantage. They toured the world, played their music in giant stadiums for thousands of screaming fans, sold millions of records, and no doubt were rich. They were on TV. Of course they were doing fine.

After I left for college in 1987, I was still very much a musician, but the bands I followed changed. I became enamored with R.E.M., a band that—mystifyingly—seemed to go out of their way not to be on TV. If R.E.M. had a video on MTV—say, “The One I Love”—you had to wait for a while and look closely to even see any of the band members’ faces. What was going on with this band that they didn’t seem to want to be on TV? I was fascinated.

I believed that, even though R.E.M. were barely on TV, they were most definitely making living. They had a record deal and sold records to people in my dorm. They toured the country and played to thousands of fans. They were on the radio, even if it might only have been college radio at first. Miraculously, they seemed to avoid being on TV, and they didn’t have to go home after a tour and, so I imagined, work a day job. They were professionals. Being in R.E.M. was their day job, yet they weren’t bending over backwards to be on TV.

Such a revelation opened me up to an entirely new subgenre of music in which it was not necessary to be on TV to earn a livelihood. The Replacements, Husker Du, and 10,000 Maniacs were three bands even less likely than R.E.M. to be on the tube, but they were written about in rock magazines like Rolling Stone and talked about amongst college-age people. They played concerts around the country—not in my town, but by the pictures in the magazines, they clearly did. They sold records. No one was starving in these bands. If they weren’t making much of a living, they were probably making some money, and they were surely on their way to making more. Again, no TV, yet they gave off the appearance of a livelihood to a young person like me.

Despite these more down-to-earth paths toward careers in music, I didn’t suspect such an achievement was in store for me. I was a 19-year-old who taught bass guitar in Davenport, Iowa. I desperately wanted a path to a career in music, but I didn’t know what that path might be. I wasn’t good enough on my instrument to be a session player. I also wasn’t the kind of guy who could be in a band like Van Halen or Skid Row, and the bands that weren’t TV favorites like R.E.M. seemed somehow beyond me as well. They were more artistic than me in some way that I couldn’t explain. I didn’t know how to become like them. I taught kids Van Halen and Skid Row songs in my hometown, played in my diligently-practicing but barely-gigging original band, and waited for something to make my path clearer.

A move to Phoenix, Arizona, offered a clue.

Read Part II here.

Read the first book ever published by D.A.N.O.T.I.

This is “Play the Game (Just a Little),” a new song written by Edwards, Hartley, and Leahy. It reveals my secret ritual for this time of year. The song will appear on my forthcoming fifth solo album, The Day Before Yesterday, which will come out in 2026. Probably first half of the year, but I’ve quit making promises like that. Feel free to purchase “Play the Game (Just a Little)” now.

• Literary agents, who all but dictate who will get a chance at a literary career

• Editors, whose livelihoods depend on book sales and not book quality

• Marketing boards, who cannot afford to accept “this book is really good” as a reason to support it

• Publishing executives, who know never to transgress corporate shareholders

• Sensitivity readers, whose misdirected efforts turn compelling prose into disguised legalese

• Activists, who stand ready to make trouble for any book that expresses political incorrectness

• Readers, who act as disgruntled customers ready to abandon or, worse, pillory authors whose works don’t satisfy their prescribed needs.

The aspiration toward writing careers—quitting our jobs, making enough money to survive, spending all day at our literary work—is the culprit. We’ve internalized the need to, on some level, acquiesce to this wide range of players in the publishing world. If there is another path to a career in literary fiction in 2026, you’ll have to show it to me.

There are, no doubt, other paths to careers in genre writing, but that comes with the requirement of adhering too closely to conventions that can easily stifle the need to create something that stretches beyond conventional parameters and toward something that transcends them.

The resulting power shift to all the players of the publishing world but the writer—the only people with the ability to create transcendent literature—has doomed the position of career writer to be just another position of compromise, and often the compromise of the work itself.

That’s all the bad news. Here’s the good news.

The abandonment of these players will eventually lead to the continuance of the literary endeavor as it has been practiced for centuries. This abandonment has never been more possible because of modern technology that, as of this moment, still allows for the relatively cheap and easy publication of work without succumbing to the power of any of the forces above.

First and foremost, it requires the literary writer to abandon the careerism that seeks to reduce their work to something that merely fits into prescribed boxes. Great works of literature don’t fit into prescribed boxes. They create their own boxes. Contemporary publishing, like never before, seeks to force contemporary writers into boxes that hamper if not preclude the creation of transcendent work.

Second, literary fiction writers must abandon the use of the internet as a device through which others read their works. The internet fosters monitored reading experiences. This injects between the only two necessary entities in the communication of great literature—the reader and the writer—another entity that seeks to influence the experience in ways no doubt both obvious and subtle. This monitoring provides these entities with information about the reading experience that has never before been captured. It can be used to further the agendas of some of the players above, who are already too powerful when compared to the writer. This information is now likely to lead to the continued development and proliferation of works that appeal to bottom lines and shareholder gains as opposed to those likely to transcend materialist concerns and speak to deeper literary concerns. If we want the literary endeavor to keep going as it has for centuries, it has to happen outside of the internet.

Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Austin, Melville, Joyce, and so many others dealt with forces in society that tried to stifle the proliferation of their work, that tried to reduce it, but none could boast the delimiting effects of the internet for making their work something less than transcendent, or for cancelling their works at the outset.

The way to get back on a path that can lead to transcendent literature is to publish works in ways that limit the impact of the above players and put the power to create back in the hands of the writer. One of those ways is the process I invented called D.A.N.O.T.I. This process involves publishing your work in a way that avoids five conventional pitfalls of contemporary publishing. D.A.N.O.T.I. removes the power from the players above and puts it back in the hands of writers. D.A.N.O.T.I. requires:

1) No careerism: The number one reason writers relinquish their literary power is that they want to trade it for a career as a writer. Remove careerism from your writing practice, and you’ll be left with nothing but the goal of creating great work.

2) No ebooks: Ebooks foster monitored reading experiences that ultimately relinquish writer power to players such as Amazon. The resulting data collection helps shape the publishing world to produce derivative works that the holders of this data deem preferable to their companies’ bottom lines.

3) No ISBNs: This barcode on the back covers of published books is meant to allow the industry to track book sales and thus determine which books to support and promote in the future. This data is then used to support derivative works that follow conventions and don’t necessarily aspire to transcendence.

4) No AI: The use of AI to create your works inherently leads to recycled ideas from the internet, which is not the way to create transcendent work. Furthermore, the owners of these programs will use your work to create other work, which is inherently derivative.

5) Little to no marketing: The more you use the internet to market your work, the more the internet has you. You must avoid using it as much as possible, and never allow the actual contents of your book to be disseminated through the internet.

Approaching the publication of your work in a way that avoids all of the above removes the power from players that seek to shape literature in conventional, materialistic ways and puts the power back in the hands of writers, who have the capacity to make transcendent literature. Adopt the above, and you will find that the only obstacle to creating the work you want to create is your own lack of talent.

Putting this power back in the hands of writers is the only way we as a literary society will get back to the creation of works that transcend. When writers have the power to create their most transcendent work, they have the power to shape work that truly gives to the reader rather than takes away from them. Transcendent work is harder to sell than conventional, derivative work, which makes it not ideal for company bottom lines. For the literary writer, the bottom line is the transcendence of the work.

Read the first book ever published by D.A.N.O.T.I.

Long before I wrote My Iliad Odyssey, I wanted to be a novelist. A big reason I wanted to be a novelist was the work of John Updike.

My decade of Updike obsession started in 1999 when I picked up a used copy of Rabbit, Run after a decade of reverence for the modernists that extended back to college. Updike’s prose magically made mundane, middle-class American life into something transcendent. He seemed to love the world he was born into, which struck me as unique among the writers I’d enjoyed to that point. Updike could use words to reveal how lucky we all were, how smiled upon. From his prose, I gathered that to continually spin about what’s wrong with the world is just another way the world is wrong. Perhaps our pleasures and contentments can be seen as something of an argument for our way of life, ends in themselves and not endless reasons to tear down what is clearly not meant to be horrible. In short, maybe life is beautiful, and God wants us to like it here.

This break toward the celestial is on full display in this massive collection of letters spanning Updike’s life from childhood in small-town Pennsylvania in the 1940s to his death on 2009. I doubted my own sanity when requesting the advance reader copy. Its 822 pages made late summer trips to the beach a little more cumbersome.

Any trepidation at its size quickly melted away when I was under the throes of Updike’s gift, such as his chronicling of when his first child was born:

There, in a little crib all wrapped up with the head sticking up like a small grapefruit, was my daughter. I scarcely know how to begin a description. The enclosed sketch, made on the spot, skillful as it is, gives no notion of the radiance of the complexion, the peculiar intricacy of the nose, or the extraordinary flexibility of the mouth, which registers, rapidly and with much saliva, pleasure, serenity, disgust, fury, and other emotions too numerous to mention.

It seems a shame every young family doesn’t have a John Updike to sit in and describe the moment-by-moment treasures. Four Updike children followed in quick succession.

Updike had a sense of his literary purpose at a very young age. As an 18-year-old, in a letter to his family, he wrote something of a manifesto for his own approach to writing. “[W]e need not a man of great courage, willing to accept the scorn of society for his art (sic Joyce) but a man who will consciously and undeviatingly strive for the approval of his age, and, by doing, not define or criticize his age, but fulfill it.” Updike never saw himself as some kind of outsider in the mold of Joyce et al. whose job was to challenge his audience. Updike didn’t want to tear down his world. He wanted to use the talent and good fortune he was given and take it as far as it would go. He did that better than anyone.

After a brief stint as a “Talk of the Town” columnist for his beloved The New Yorker, Updike took his small family to Ipswich, Massachusetts, to live in the suburbs where he continued to write. His characteristic lyrical style is always there in his letters. He found nothing mysterious about his approach, as revealed to his writer mother in one of his frequent letters home. “Forget style. Any person expressing himself sincerely has style. Style is the syntactical arrangement a person’s way of looking at things compel him to take—no, not the way, the things.”

Updike’s own distinct prose style came as natural to him as falling out of bed. Anything but pointing out through words the things he loved was a pose. Staying true to that principle made him a gorgeous writer. What is linguistic mastery without a soul that cares about its subject?

Updike cared about far more than language. He loved his family, but he also loved other women. After a decade or so of something of an open marriage with his first wife Mary, he fell in love with Martha, and over the course of a few years, he divorced and remarried.

One of the perks of being a lover of John Updike was his ability to write a good love letter. In one such letter to Martha, he describes the shock of rereading his old letters to her as “a look at myself through a camera I didn’t know was taking pictures.” (456). If Updike wrote, as estimated by the book’s editor, 25,000 letters in his life, a good portion of them went to the romantic interests of his life. He eventually settled down with Martha in Massachusetts and kept out of trouble writing books, stories, reviews, and essays.

All of the usual complaints against Updike are fortified by this collection. He could be self-indulgent. One letter has him going over three versions of his signature, discussing the qualities of the various iterations. He could be politically incorrect. For a time, his letters featured the c-word to describe women’s anatomy. He had a knack for hanging on to his cat-bird position at The New Yorker, which paid well and could dictate writing careers. His letters to several different editors of that magazine span over 50 years. What I think people found most galling, however, was the fact that Updike wrote more beautifully about mundane American lives—their lives—than anybody who ever existed. Yes, his work appeared everywhere important for several decades—his byline as ubiquitous as a house fly. Even worse, he may have deserved it.

Such a blessed life eventually winds down, and Updike waxed nostalgic as the years passed. His letters (still on paper sent through the mail) started to emphasize all that was missing from contemporary society. “My impression,” he writes in 1994, “is that there is almost no sense, in writers under forty-five, of there having been a religious upbringing or that there is anything of a religious question hanging over human existence.” Religion was rarely at the forefront of Updike’s work, but the cosmos always had some role to play in the circumstances of the characters. God wasn’t the point, but God was there. When a story lacks that presence, how can it not feel less important? Updike needed that presence in the things he read, and he couldn’t avoid it in what he wrote.

For a guy who always seemed curious about this or that cultural event, Updike had no tolerance for the internet. He never sent an email, and he carried a jaundiced opinion of the mode’s effect on literature. “The Internet,” he writes in 2007, “is characterized by imprecision and groupthink—an illusion of fellowship is created without the reality of physical presence and copyeditors. It seeks the end of authorship.” What a threat to someone who’d spent 60 years amassing more printed matter than seemingly anyone in human history. The people of contemporary society now loved things he didn’t love—or worse, they didn’t love anything. He died in 2009 from lung cancer, griping about his “wretched writing” in the last letter of the collection.

Updike appreciated the role he got to play as America’s man of letters for the latter half the 20^th century. He knew how lucky he was, and he didn’t want to squander it. He recognized how he’d failed as a family man, and he did what he could to redeem himself to his ex-wife and children. He loved being American, and he struggled to tolerate those who could find nothing good to say about their shared homeland. He was happy enough much of the time so long as you didn’t bring up a negative review of his work. He was gifted, worked hard, and was rewarded at the level of literary king. I’m tempted to believe he’s the last person who will get to live such a life, but I’m not going to go there. If I did, would his writing have taught me anything?

As revealed above, the reading is on Thursday, 11/20, from 6:30-8:30 PM at Portland’s Taborspace in the Copeland Commons room. Readings start at 7 PM. It’s totally free. Please let me know if you plan to attend.

Also, a piece on my love of the trade paperback recently appeared at the Spectator, which is the oldest surviving magazine in the world.

I find paperbacks to be the best reading experience that ever existed, but a quick survey of my writer friends revealed that I’m more or less alone.

One reads only library books in hardback.

Another reads library books and ebooks.

A third prefers library books, ebooks, and audiobooks.

It took a fourth to finally mention the trade paperback, and she prefers the form only because it’s cheaper than the hardback.

Read all about why trade paperback rule here. Paywall warning, but you can do the free trial!

It’s hard to convey the deep value I find in Dan Sinykin’s 2023 nonfiction work Big Fiction. His book offers the reader a glimpse into the effects of American publishing on literature from the 1930s to today. What happened that led to, say, the paperback novel? How did we go from that form to trade paperbacks? What led to the rise of genre fiction? Why, all of a sudden, did writers as mega-popular as Stephen King, Judith Krantz, and Danielle Steel emerge? Where is this all likely headed in the age of Amazon? These seem like important questions, but Sinykin manages to contain them enough with what feels like sound reporting, as well as colorful portrayals of the book publishing personalities that affected the form. He’s created an extremely valuable portrait of the 20^th century U.S. book publishing world.

Sinykin takes the time necessary to unravel the path of book publishing in the U.S. During World War II, American publishers invented the cheap, accessible book version known as the mass market paperback to satisfy the needs of soldiers off at war. These are the smaller paperback books printed on pulpier paper that I associate with bodice-ripping covers and usually sell for as little as possible.

After the war, many newly bookish military men came home looking to attend college, and the mass market paperback flourished during this era. Before then, according to Sinykin, books were by and large still a coastal phenomenon in the country. Literary offerings by the likes of by Faulkner and Hemingway benefited by being included in this mass market form, and the future titans of literature were sold in metal shopping stands at your local drug store and grocer. I love imagining the surprise of someone strolling up for the first time to one of those spinning displays, being enticed by the newly minted covers of a Mickey Spillane or Harold Robbins or James Baldwin novel, making the display a weekly, pleasurable stop on their shopping to-do list.

An advancement to this form came about when an editor at Doubleday named Jason Epstein in the 1950s wanted to get the great literary works of his time out of the drugstores and railways stations and into actual bookstores. This led to the invention of the trade paperback—“a tactic to reclaim a space of distinction against the flattening impulse of the mass market.” These are the slightly larger paperback books that still today tend to be associated with literary as opposed to genre fiction. Epstein’s tastes slanted literary, so much so that, when Doubleday refused to publish Lolita, he left the company for Random House, which featured an impressive catalog of literary greats such as Faulkner, Stein, and Ellison.

In his new position, Epstein continued to cultivate a literary culture around the trade paperback form. By the late 1950s, the academic, literary, highbrow set had a paperback version they could call their own, and literary novelists managed to carve a place for themselves, if not flourish, in the bookstores of the country.

But publishing is a business, and these two forms—the mass market and trade paperback—continued to evolve. The biggest impact for the industry came during a period of conglomeration, which started to change the game. Sinykin writes that these comglomerates were run by “bureaucratic managers who were incentivized, above all, to grow the organization, ‘even at the expense of profitability.’” As one example, bigger companies such as the electronics giant RCA bought well-heeled literary entities such as Random House. The giant multi-business corporations that are ubiquitous now were just starting to make themselves known. By 1990, these conglomerates would buy up virtually all of the money-making U.S. publishers.

This takeover was fine for a while. Editors at these houses managed to keep the hounds of the parent companies at bay and keep the focus, by and large, on artistic adventure and quality work. Sinykin spends a few pages diving deeply into the novel Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow (1975), a kind of fascinating case study that he describes as “a heterodox account of the origin of the culture industry.” It’s the story of “an artist betraying his political values to become a cultural entrepreneur in the budding film industry.” The novel for Sinykin serves as a kind of bellwether for where this conglomeration was likely to lead the industry. It was that rare effort that “accommodated the aesthetic demands of popular readers, the literary establishment, and academia.” Can one book satisfy all of these markets? The answer, to publishing editors and executives, was yes. All of a sudden, the drugstore racks that contained both Spillane and Faulkner weren’t just holding separate titles. The literary and the popular were existing in the same work.

It wasn’t long, however, before this new arrangement started “eroding editorial, and thus authorial autonomy.” In the 1980s, the industry shifted again. Parent companies, hitherto letting the publishers run the show, were paying attention to those books that could reach across markets, and they were getting involved to make it happen. In the broadest sense, this became the era of “‘remodeling the author as a content creator’ whose intellectual property might be monetized across media.” Think Steel, King, and Krantz—writers of mega-books that sold millions of copies and often became mega-films.

This was a wonderful development for the populist expansion of the form. Sinykin writes, “Success came to depend less on knowing the right people, hanging out, say, in Sag Harbor, and more on one’s capacity to accommodate in one’s work the demands of the system.” It was no longer about who you knew but whether you had the story that could move units. Everyone on the planet now had a chance to succeed in publishing, not just the elite.

As promising as that sounds, it was clear that the artists and editors were no longer running the show. There was an industry to satisfy, and the prospect of a big seller enticed even the most literary of writers to see what they could do to scare up sales. I was shocked when Sinykin pointed out that Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison is on one level a horror story. In retrospect, of course it is, but its mild nod to genre had never been noticed by me. All the Pretty Horses (1992), the mega-selling literary effort by Cormac McCarthy, is easier to place in the western genre. These books were successful not because they were literary but because the majority of the folks who buy books were having their needs fulfilled, and those film rights must’ve led to a nice check or two for writers who had struggled for decades to build audiences.

It’s easy for me to romanticize this era of publishing: literary recognition as lofty as the Nobel, lots of captive readers ready to follow your lead, and film residuals to boot. This 1980s era strikes me as the sweet spot for being a literary writer in America, and not just for the top of the field.

So, where did we go from there? Amazon debuted in 1995 and since then has become the most prolific and interesting bookseller, publisher, and seller of, well, everything. In his title Everything and Less, Mark McGurl goes one step further: “[W]e might think of [Amazon] not only as the protagonist of contemporary literary life but as its most emblematic ‘author,’ as deserving in its way of lending its name to the literary period in which it appears as Samuel Johnson was of the Age of Johnson … or Ezra Pound was of the Pound Era.” The book landscape has changed fundamentally, and this new book order casts a shadow over every word Sinykin writes. There is the sense that the good old days are gone.

Perhaps for this reason, Sinykin waits until the end of his book to mention the behemoth in the room of 21^st century literary culture. This was a relief for me. I get enough about Amazon just looking out my office window as my neighbor receives yet another package of such size that it must contain a plasma TV, or electric bike, or refrigerator, or all three. It’s impossible to deny my envy as this “bookseller” gets more attention—by one hundred miles—than any contemporary author, but it’s also the result of trying to be an author during the era of Amazon. From the time I first wrote “Once upon a time” in 1997, I’ve watched the literary landscape slowly change to something I don’t recognize, and this is heartbreaking for many reasons.

I much prefer Sinykin’s chapter on the remaining large, money-making U.S. independent publisher, of which there is exactly one: W.W. Norton. I always thought of this entity as the publisher of the anthologies I bought for undergraduate English classes. They are indeed that, but in the 1990s, they were also the one taking risks on fiction by Chuck Palahniuk, Walter Mosley, Patrick O’Brien, and others, and being rewarded for it. Such a company—which is owned entirely by its employees—shouldn’t exist today, but it does. It is the last vestige of a book world I loved and aspired to. If they’re still here, there’s still hope.

I invested 1,500 words in the wonder of Big Fiction because I’ve never read a book that chronicles so much about the U.S. publishing world in the 20^th century, and analyzes it so effectively. If there is another book that does such a good job of telling the story of this publishing era, I don’t know about it. This substantial achievement shouldn’t be lost in what I write next.

Sinykin has another point to his book. He wants to state what participation in this system means for the fiction we read during this era. In short, Sinykin wants to show that “[t]he books available to us today are products of the conglomerate era.” Fair enough. Despite the vast number of books that have come to us via non-conglomerate entities, I know what he means. If you got enamored with fiction over the past 70 years, most likely you came to your interest through books published by these conglomerates.

But Sinykin reaches for a more radical thesis. He writes in his introduction, “I show how much we miss when we fall for the romance of individual genius.” Again, there is much truth in that statement. Sinykin does a great job of showing how conglomerate publishing not only fostered the publications of certain classics by late 20^th century greats such as McCarthy, Morrison, Doctorow, and others, but also helped shape the contents of their fiction. His arguments are persuasive. After reading his work, there is no doubt in my mind that these conglomerates had at least an invisible and sometimes perhaps even an overtly acknowledged hand in the creation of the great literary works of the latter half of the 20^th century. You can’t publish a book in such a conglomerate environment and expect the mothership not to have some kind of influence over what the book actually contains, and considering the great books that came out during this era, it was no doubt often a positive influence. It has been inherent in the publication process of great literature from at least the late 1970s through today, and it is therefore all but futile to deny.

For me, this publishing arrangement does nothing to quell the idea that these books, by and large, are the products not so much of the conglomerate era but of the individual geniuses that created them. How do I know? There are many reasons. It’s as obvious as looking at the thousands upon thousands of fiction titles that were published during the 1980s and 1990s that we do not associate with anything resembling individual genius. The vast majority of fictional works published during this era—during any era—were well meaning but largely forgettable books that did not result in anyone but their authors and maybe a few others remembering them beyond their initial publication windows. Do we think of these books as the literary failures of the conglomerates? Of course not. They are the product of anywhere from competent to less-than-competent authors who happened to have their works published by these entities during this time. If Sinykin is going to give the conglomerates credit for the genius of the great fiction of their era, then I don’t know why all comglomerate published work wasn’t genius.

But I’m being disingenuous. I know why all of their published books weren’t genius. Because only a select few were written by people who had the talent and skills that might lead to a work of genius. Sinykin wants to put the cart before the horse. If you eat too much ice cream, you might get fat. You wouldn’t get fat because you have a stomach. You would get fat because you ate too much ice cream. Sure, you couldn’t get fat without a stomach, but you have to do some serious mental jiu jitsu to equate the fact that you have a stomach to the reason you got fat.

The above Sinykin quote is not the only instance in Big Fiction where the author wants to over-emphasize the role of conglomerate publishing in the creative success of the writer. In another instance, he pokes Danielle Steel for a comment she wrote in a blog post in 2012:

I’ve reacted with amazement, shock, and outrage when people have asked me in my fan mail, who writes my books…WHO writes my BOOKS? Are you kidding? Who do you think writes my books …

Sinykin writes of this passage: “With a childlike seriousness …[Steel] wants to be the inspired creator solely responsible for her art, but everything about her art—its formulaic plots, its women’s mag prose style, its mass production—betrays its mechanicity.”

I’m not a great person to talk about the novels of Danielle Steel. I’ve never read one. Danielle Steel is for me what I’m sure she is for most people. She’s the extremely successful author of dozens, maybe hundreds, of romance novels. In fairness to Sinykin, she does continue in her blog post to be dramatic about her process and how difficult it is for her.

But does this quote really say what Sinykin thinks it says? Does Steel want to be the “inspired creator solely responsible for her art”? I don’t think so. She just wants you to know that—even when she was writing six or seven novels a year—she wrote her own damn novels. If that’s true—and I have no reason to believe it's not—then why not be proud and say so? Good for her.

This is an inconvenient truth for Sinykin. I believe, having never read a word of Steel in my life save what Sinykin printed in Big Fiction, that Steel has some genius for communication that most of us could never understand. Of course, her work was aided by her environment and her publisher, but these were merely the delivery method for her stories (the stomach), which people read and enjoyed enough to buy more and more titles by her (the ice cream). What is the essence of the phenomenon of Danielle Steel? I would more likely believe that it’s something that goes on between her books and her readers than the path those books took to get to her readers. If Steel is beholden to anyone, it’s not publishing. It’s her readers.

Quick: name the publisher of Dickens? How about Austen? Melville? I’m a lifelong lover of all things literary, and I can’t name these publishers. Yet off the top of my head, I can name Dickens, Austen, and Melville a century or two after their deaths. What must these publishers have been like? I’m picturing an apparatus like a Guttenberg press, someone (I’m guessing) gluing those printed pages together and maybe stretching leather across some board-like material to create covers. Then the package is glued or stitched together and put in the publisher’s store front for sale. This could all be accurate, or it could all be wrong. From my perspective as someone who loves classic literature, I don’t really care.

What matters is that this cottage industry had the stewards to bring the masterworks of these writers to enough of the public that they eventually found the way to future generations, where they entertain us and impart their wisdom. For me, this is the essence of the publishing industry, the one part that truly matters. It’s extremely helpful if the industry earns livings for people like writers and publishers, but to me, that’s secondary to having an industry that has the capacity to deliver this generation’s Homer to the generations that follow. I’m sure shareholders disagree with me about the purpose of the publishing industry. I suspect it wouldn’t be the only thing we disagree about.

Do we still have that industry? In 1993, before I started writing novels and participating on the internet, there were an estimated 300,000 titles published by U.S. publishers, according to data from the American Book Publishers Association (now the Association of American Publishers). In 2023, Publishers Weekly and Bowker put the number of U.S. self-published titles receiving ISBNs at 2.6 million. If the latter number is correct, that’s all but guarantees that the number of books per year in the U.S. has gone up exponentially in the past few decades I’m going to estimate that we as a society have not added significantly to the number of readers of any kind of book-length work since 1993. If we as readers and reviewers are not able to sift through all of these books every year, then how are we to know which are worth passing on? If we’re not able to find the titles worth passing on, they might not get passed on. That’s one way this process falls apart.

Another way is if writers simply are not capable of writing books worth passing on. Sinykin is confident that this isn’t the case. He writes, “I don’t believe that the novels written in the last forty years are worse than those written in the forty years previous.” As someone who has published three novels since 2003, I’m glad for Sinykin’s optimism. As someone who has slowly lost interest in the novel form over the last three decades, I can’t say I share it.

Western society once dipped into several centuries of cultural stagnation, which has been described as the Dark Ages or the Middle Ages. Many such as the 14^th century poet Petrarch have described this previous era in gloomy terms. He wrote, “Amidst the errors there shone forth men of genius; no less keen were their eyes, although they were surrounded by darkness and dense gloom.”

If this dark era happened—many contemporary scholars have argued it didn’t—why did it happen? There were many perceived reasons for this stagnation—the fall of the Roman Empire, the ascension of Christianity over paganism, the corruption of the Catholic church, a substantial economic downturn. In any case, the result was a decline in literacy, learning, and other noted cultural pursuits.

Could a new dark age be caused by a flood of books and dearth of serious readers for those books? I hope not, but the signs are getting harder to ignore. The National Endowment for the Arts has reported a four-percent drop from 2017 to 2022 in the percentage of adults who read at least one book in the past year. In 2022, Americans read an average of 12.6 books, fewer than in any previous Gallup survey since 1990. There are several other statistics one could dive into that suggest a decline in the current century in the deep reading we associate with the books Sinykin concerns himself with.

The movement of attention from books to—one presumes—other media doesn’t mean we’re doomed for a new period of mass illiteracy. It could be a different kind of literacy, one that doesn’t rely on deep reading to achieve the advancements we might normally associate with those who read deeply. If there are enough authors to write millions of books per year, there must be some readers out there, if only the authors themselves. With AI just getting its footing, the number of books published per year is only going to go up.

But if we dip into a less enlightened era, one that sees the novel form become less of what it was a few decades ago, this slow erosion of deep readers is going to be seen as an emblem of the phenomenon. I’ve always been deeply skeptical of the use of other media to replicate what we get from reading books. There’s just something important you can get from the undistracted reading of a book that I don’t believe you can get anywhere else. I’ve always believed it has something to do with the time it takes for most to make it through a book. Even the fastest readers take at least a few hours to read a title, which is longer than even watching your typical film, and certainly longer than whatever the last thing I engaged with on YouTube was. There’s going to be an impact from the substitution of deep reading for engagement with other media. Let’s hope it’s not a terrible one.

So, it’s possible that, as Sinykin states, contemporary novels haven’t gotten worse. I hope he’s right, and I’ve just missed these titles.

Because of Sinykin’s insights, I better understand that the publishing industry’s substantial role in the creation of the great novels of the world, but their roles were not as important as the greatness of the writers of the era. We’ve been blessed with the perfect combination of world and souls to offer us the special literature that will be talked about and written about for a long time. Will the 21^st century’s literature be revered as well? It’s not guaranteed. There are ebbs and flows of genius, in society’s ability to bring genius to us, and in our ability to understand it. We should feel lucky to have any era that brings great literature to the world.

If you’d like to read more of my nonfiction, buy my memoir, which is available now for preorder.

I love nonfiction, so much so that I just released my first book of nonfiction, a memoir called My Iliad Odyssey. Check out the blurb and buy the book. You’ll get a cool book in your mailbox in a week. When’s the last time you looked forward to something coming to your mailbox?

Despite my love of nonfiction, I’d suggest that we pay a heavy price for wishing our fiction to read like nonfiction. That price is the ability of fiction to take us closer to the ineffable. When a writer’s goal is merely to ensure that the reader continues to feel that the world the writer is creating is like real life, the writer often sacrifices the ability for their work to transcend real life, to become more important than real life in a way people like me still go to fiction to experience. Few if any who read Moby-Dick or The Bluest Eye or A Red Badge of Courage are overly concerned with the question, “Did this really happen?” In the most important way, it does.

As a reader and writer of memoir, I understand and respect that the form works with the author's memory as the primary source, that the emotional truths they render are the point of the story while the details—who said or did what where—are simply bones on which to hang the muscles and flesh of the author's interior plight. That’s the name of the game in memoir—to touch people through the retelling of some part of your story. The nonfiction aspect of a memoir is really just window dressing for me, not something upon which to get stuck. If the memory is composed with a bit of fiction, that’s fine with me, so long as the author isn’t overtly lying.

The chief issue every writer in the 2020s has to deal with is, how do I keep my reader interested enough in my work to finish it? We live in a world with a million distractions, and most of them—at least on their surfaces—seem more compelling than reading books.

One of the few author tools that still cuts through well enough to ensure some attention is to tell people about your real life. “This happened to me” still gets our attention. “Here, look at my life,” especially the dirty side, offers a voyeuristic thrill. “Let me tell you about my experiences with this famous person” perks up our senses. These are classic techniques to pique interest. The addiction memoir all but requires the writer tell about themselves at their lowest points. It's also hard for me to imagine an abuse memoir without the author offering flinch-worthy details of the abuse. I seem to have a thing for the real side of writers’ financial lives. I once read an article by a favorite writer Steve Almond, and all I remembered about the article a week later was that he mentioned that he'd made $90k as a writer the previous year. Really? Is that, on some level, what I care most about? I wouldn't have thought so, but if that’s all I remember, that's pretty damning evidence.

In 2025, when just about every other form of art and entertainment seems on the surface more compelling to most people, writers can’t afford to ignore the appeal of this aspect of their material. Many writers get this instinctually, and they lean heavily on the sense that they're telling you about their inner lives, their money, their shame, their abuses both given and received. Give many of us any of these aspects in your pages, and we’re automatically interested.

The only problems come when the memoirist starts lying without letting the reader in on it. The most famous example is the memoir A Million Little Pieces, whose author James Frey in 2001 went from reaping the rewards of being an Oprah book club pick to becoming the focus of her wrath when it was discovered he fictionalized aspects of his book. This was a big event in the reading and writing world. Oprah expressed her fury with Frey right there on TV in front of us, and Frey and his publisher did their best to defend his book.

Despite sympathizing with Frey, I thought this fictionalization did not shine well upon the author or my ability to appreciate his work. I avoided A Million Little Pieces for years, and I eventually picked up the audiobook version to see what all the fuss was about. I thought the book was a compellingly written addiction memoir that offered an alternative to typical AA-style recovery paths. There’s a rumor that the book was originally written as a novel, but Frey’s agent couldn’t sell it as such, so he called it a memoir. It seems to me, memoirists get away with this type of embellishment all the time. The rule, as I've surmised, is don't lie about anything for which you might get caught.

Some of the most accomplished writers I know claim that they don't care if a memoirist knowingly fictionalizes. At a conference once, a panelist went so far as to say that she doesn't even look to see whether the book-length narrative she's reading is fiction or memoir. Why would it matter? she implied.

I think I understand why many folks feel this way. Writers who come from the literary world respect attempts to get emotional truths onto the page, and therefore they don't fuss much over whether a piece is fiction or nonfiction. It's a goal I generally associate with poetry. When I read “The Good-Morrow” by John Donne, I'm not asking myself, “Is this true? Did Donne write this love poem to some woman? Who was she?” I’m struck by the ability of the author to use language to pull me out of more pedestrian concerns such as whether the work is fiction or nonfiction and toward more transcendent aspects of being human: being in love, communicating both beautifully and honestly. In short, the poem speaks to my better angels on important subjects. Getting there is what’s special to me about the reading process.

It's important to note that I most definitely am not the type of reader who chases down sources to make sure a writer's work of nonfiction is indeed nonfiction. Between my day job and other interests, I'm stuck behind a computer more than I care to be. If you lie to me in your memoir, it's likely I'm never going to find out. Sometimes these things find me, but most of the time I don't care.

What I do care about is the level of trust I offer to a writer with whom I’m engaged. If you don't care that what you say in a piece of nonfiction is nonfiction, then what does that say about the other truths offered in your work? Maybe nothing, but the lie at the outset opens the possibility for me to wonder, and the time spent wondering is time I’m not giving myself fully to your work.

I can be reeled in with the nonfictional aspects of a writer’s work, but when it comes down to it, I want their work to transcend those concerns. Writer Karen Karbo once said to me, “If you reader is doing math in their head while reading your book, you’re in trouble.” I’d add that you’re also in trouble if your reader is worried about whether what you say in a nonfiction work is true or not. How can I trust you to tell the truth about higher things if you’re lying about everything else?

If you want the unvarnished truth about a novelist who pounded his head against the door of traditional publishing for decades only to be reminded that the rewards of a life in literature had little to do with publishing your work, then you’d like My Iliad Odyssey. Check out the blurb and buy the book.

When I started my memoir My Iliad Odyssey, which is now available for preorder at my website, I was aware of some genres that straddle the fence between fiction and nonfiction. To me, memoir is about making an honest effort to write what you remember. The emotional truth of the writer’s experience is what matters, even if some of the facts are challenge-able. If the writer believes it to be true, then it belongs in a memoir.

What typically happens when you write a memoir is you think of something that would make the story better, even though it didn’t actually happen. If you include that element in the story, from my vantage, you’re now writing fiction. At that point, it’s only fair to your reader—or at least to my reader—to call it fiction.

We all recognize writers who write books that rely on the sense that you’re reading about their real life, even if they include fictional elements. One of the chief ways to do so is through the genre of autofiction, which is practiced by several bestselling authors such as Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk, and Sigrid Nunez.

“Autofiction,” coined in the 1970s by Serge Doubrovsky, refers to fiction that takes the form of fictionalized autobiography. The overall effect of the prose is similar to that of memoir—without the author conceding the ability to make things up. Opinions vary on what makes a work autofiction, but I believe there is one essential element to the form: The details of the narrative must suggest the author's life to the point that it becomes a challenge to read the work as anything but memoir. The work compels the reader to believe they’re reading about the writer and not a fictional character. That’s what makes a piece of autofiction work.

I became aware of autofiction in 2015 with the sudden literary popularity of the My Struggle series of books by Karl Ove Knausgaard. I bought My Struggle: Book 1 and found myself transfixed by the author’s ability to mine the banal aspects of his life for elements that made me want to keep reading: his fraught relationship with his father, his teen angst, his pain surrounding his father’s death. I read Book 1 quickly and proceeded to listen to audiobook versions of Book 2 through Book 5 on commutes to and from work. I listened to each of these books repeatedly. For the final Book 6, I bought the paperback and dedicated several weeks in the fall of 2020 to reading its 1,200 pages. I remember the experience as infectious, delicious. I’d never read a book so long. I even loved the 400 pages on Hitler. Part of me wants to start the whole series over again right now.

So, why did I sense that My Struggle—as well as other autofiction titles I’ve enjoyed in the interim—did not ascend the heights of the great literary works of the 20^th century, such as those by past favorites Updike, Morrison, and Bellow? It lacked some majesty I associated with the work of these giants. It felt a little pulpy, a little cheap. I enjoyed it, but it wasn‘t really good.

What was wrong with it, to my mind? And if the answer was nothing, then what was wrong with me? Why was I placing an impediment to my enjoyment of these titles by believing they were somehow less important, less exemplary? I loved the process of reading and listening to My Struggle, yet at the same time I found it lacking something that made me want to call it great fiction.

Central to the pleasure of autofiction is the voyeuristic rush I get from reading about people—especially literary people—going about their lives. Despite its admitted fictional elements, I read autofiction as I suspect it’s meant to be read, as though it offers some real sense of what it’s like to write a bestselling literary work (My Struggle), or to be a well-known literary writer in your community (Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend), or to jet-set around Europe to teach writing workshops (Rachel Cusk’s Outline). I call this the Lifestyles of the Writerly Rich and Famous aspect of these stories. Autofiction writers may or may not be rich or famous, but to me, many are at least at the top of their field. Autofiction seems to allow for a peek behind the curtain of successful writers’ lives, and I indulge.

I also suspect autofiction works are enjoyable to me the way genre works are enjoyable to those who love genre fiction. As a youth, I never developed a deep kinship with genre work. After becoming a convert to literature during college and reading vociferously for decades, autofiction didn’t strike me as important in the way that I found The Adventures of Augie March or The Bluest Eye or One-Hundred Years of Solitude important. Still, I clearly enjoyed it. It was technically fiction, right? And it had at least some of the trappings of literary work. Were my feelings of diminishment autofiction’s problem or mine?

With autofiction, the line between fiction and nonfiction is purposefully blurred for reader effect. Technically, autofiction is fiction, but for me, it's impossible to separate Karl Ove Knausgaard from My Struggle’s narrator, or Sigrid Nunez from the narrator of The Friend, or Rachel Cusk from the narrator of Outline. On an important if unspoken level, I read these books as though I'm reading about the lives of these authors. For this reason, I've never liked the term “autofiction.” I think “barely fiction” is a clearer way to explain the effect of autofiction on the reader and to avoid the misconception that something about the autofiction writing process is automatic.

With its ability to play on both sides of the fiction/nonfiction fence, autofiction ought to be the best of both worlds when it comes to my reading experience. Not only do I get the strong, visceral sense of a real-world protagonist, I also get the advantages of the made-up world of fiction and some of the expanded possibilities that come with that. Or at least I should. In my experience, autofiction doesn’t work that way. Technically, autofiction is fiction, but it sacrifices many of the metaphorical advantages of fiction so the reader feels they are reading about the real life of the author.

When I read autofiction, I adopt a strange position in relation to the work. Despite understanding intellectually that I’m reading fiction, the trappings of the memoir have more to say about how I actually read the book than any supposed made-up aspect of the book’s contents. If the author’s name is Bill Smith, and the protagonist’s name is Bill Smith, and something about the way the story is told suggests that Bill Smith is telling me about his life, and there’s nothing obvious in the tale that points me to the idea that Bill Smith is making things up (say, Bill Smith goes to Jupiter), then there’s a very good if not inevitable chance that I’m going to read the story as though Bill Smith is telling me about his life.

Furthermore, there is a long, more-or-less healthy tradition in storytelling that understands and maybe encourages the tendency for the teller to expand the notion of truth in a nonfiction piece. When recounting stories, people often embellish details for effect. When someone tells the story of the largest fish they ever caught, we understand they’re probably adding a few inches or pounds. Listeners or readers internalize that the teller might be fudging the truth here or there, but so long as the result is an interesting tale and the changes seem more or less inconsequential, we roll with it. Any sin for “stretchers,” as Mark Twain called them, are of the ordinal variety. We crave good stories that feel real. Meet that demand, and we—or at least I—won’t go running to the internet to check your facts.

What feels less substantial about autofiction is that it often sacrifices some of the metaphorical rewards of fiction for the sense that you’re reading memoir. Works of autofiction often go out of their way not to clue you into their fictional natures. For example, sometimes the cover of a book of autofiction avoids including that helpful declarative “A Novel,” even though that’s what most accurately describes its contents. There seems to be an unspoken agreement between the reader of autofiction and its authors/publishers. The author/publisher won’t go out of their way to tell you it’s fiction, and you won’t ask too many questions about the truthfulness of its content, thus avoiding the break in the memoir illusion. This tacit agreement makes autofiction different from roman à clef, a more openly fictional mode of thinly veiled autobiography employed by many famous writers of the 20^th century; or Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series of novels, which despite the feel at times of memoir are openly described as her “Neapolitan Novels.” By comparison, the publishing machine primarily describes Knausgaard’s My Struggle series as “Books,” or if you dig a bit, “autobiographical novels.” Autofiction doesn’t want you focused on the fact that it’s fiction. Its appeal is that it feels like memoir.

Let me offer some examples from works of autofiction that hopefully clarify why the process of reading these works feels less substantial to me than reading great fictional work. In Book 5 of My Struggle, the narrator Karl Ove is asked by his older brother Yngve to attend a concert with him. Karl Ove asks his brother if he can bring his new girlfriend Tonje, whom Yngve has never met. Karl Ove and Tonje have just started a romance, and they’re very much in love. Why not introduce his new girlfriend to his brother, another person he deeply loves in the world?

On the night of the concert, the young lovers walk hand in hand to the venue, and they sit with Yngve at a table. The conversation is stilted. Karl Ove buys a round of beers, and Tonje and Yngve warm up to each other, talking in a friendly way. The threesome drink together and move towards the band as they play, and Tonje and Yngve continue talking, seemingly getting along well.

After a few beers, Karl Ove starts to get the feeling that Tonje and Yngve are getting along a little too well. In his drunk and vulnerable state, Karl Ove thinks Tonje sees how much better Yngve is than him, and that she no doubt wishes to be with his older brother instead. Karl Ove grows morose. He can’t believe he brought this on himself. He excuses himself, goes to the bathroom, finds a shard of glass, and pulls it down his cheek. It draws blood. He pulls the shard down his other cheek, pushing as hard as he can, and more blood flows. He goes back out to their table.

The pair, still deep in conversation, don’t notice Karl Ove’s self-harm. Karl Ove drinks more, goes back to the bathroom, sits at a stall, finds the shard, and cuts himself three more times. He goes back out to the table, and this time Yngve comments that perhaps Karl Ove had cut himself shaving that morning. Tonje and Yngve continue to talk, and Karl repeatedly goes back to the bathroom until every part of his face is cut. Miraculously, he manages to get through the concert without either Tonje or Yngve understanding what he’s done. It isn’t until they’re in line for a café later that Tonje screams when she sees blood on Karl Ove’s face. She is shocked, confused. Karl Ove immediately leaves them. Yngve calls after him, but Karl Ove tells Yngve to leave him alone and to take care of Tonje. Karl Ove goes back to his apartment, gets into bed, and falls asleep waiting for Tonje’s knock on the door.

What do I love about this scene? It brings to the fore the common human foible of jealousy, that especially deep kind that the young experience during an early love. Why would anyone be interested in me when they could have x, y, or z? This scene perfectly dramatizes the powerful emotions often associated with youth when one first ventures into the world as someone in a serious relationship. To top it off, Karl Ove imagines losing Tonje to, of all people, his older brother. To me, Knausgaard has effectively set up a scene in which a particular form of deep jealousy rears its ugly head, and I can’t wait to see happens.

And boy, does something happen, something dark and strange that reflects some of the deep pain associated with these feelings. Karl Ove’s decision to self-mutilate feels like a dramatization of his self-loathing, or perhaps his fury at walking blindly into what he suspected would be a pleasant evening but has turned horribly wrong. For whatever reason, the young man wasn’t ready to introduce his girlfriend to his brother. Knausgaard has crafted a fictional scene in which he renders the anger and pain of not being ready for the certain stage of life you happen to occupy, and who can’t relate?

But wait? The scene is fiction, right? All those trips to the bathroom, all those cuts, all that time without anyone noticing. To this point—despite any evidence to the contrary—I’ve read My Struggle as memoir. The deep emotional connection I feel with another real person through what I perceive as nonfiction is, for me, essential to reading Knausgaard’s series. What I was stuck on was, did Knausgaard the author drag a piece of glass down his face to the point of repeatedly cutting himself or not? I thought of him as this handsome if well-worn artistic type in early middle age. In the pictures I’d seen of him—like the ones on the covers of his books—I didn’t remember seeing scars on his face. I searched the internet for images of the author, and none of them seemed to show scars. Did he not cut himself deeply enough to leave scars? The scene reads like he does. Are these internet images Photoshopped? Does Knausgaard have scars on his face from these incidents (there’s a second face-cutting scene in the series), or doesn’t he?

I don’t want to care about the seemingly fictional aspect of the scene. Knausgaard has drawn me in to better understand an aspect of myself and people in general—as Updike et al. have done many times before—and that would be enough in a conventional novel. Instead, I’m forced to grapple with this perceived fiction. I feel like the illusion of memoir has been violated. I’m not focused—at least not entirely and maybe only fractionally—on the truth and beauty of the metaphorical scene Knausgaard has conveyed here, effectively dramatizing the jealousy of the young and in love. I’m focused on whether this glass cutting scene actually happened, and I’m focused on it because to this point Knausgaard has sold me on the fact that he’s writing about his life in a literal way. I obviously find the metaphorical element of the piece engaging, but I’m stuck on the supposed real-life aspect of it.

If the character in My Struggle named Karl Ove Knausgaard was instead named Bill Smith, the problem is solved. Despite the “fiction” in autofiction, I feel autofiction authors rely too much on the sense that their work is memoir, and I can’t let go of that when a scene strikes me as more fictional. Something of the contract between writer and this reader, for me, is broken. Emotionally, I don’t quite know what I’m reading, and I’m pulled out.  

A similar moment for me occurs in the autofiction work The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. In it, Nunez, a writer in Manhattan, is successful enough to publish books and teach graduate-level writing classes. When an older male colleague—with whom she’d had a friendship and some long-past romantic connection—commits suicide, Nunez has unresolved feelings about their relationship. In a weird yet convincing twist, the dead colleague’s widow winds up getting Nunez to take his dog, an extremely large breed of Great Dane named Apollo, the ownership of which poses multiple problems. How will Nunez manage life in her studio apartment in a big city with this large pet? On a deeper level, her relationship with the dog becomes a chance to work out her complicated feelings about the death of her friend and colleague.

Not only is Apollo huge, he’s deeply connected to the dead author. At first, he spends his time seemingly depressed and waiting for his former owner to reappear. Then one night while Nunez lies on an air mattress in her apartment—a result of Apollo having coopted her bed—the dog approaches her. He seems to consider her in a new light. Nunez doesn’t move, letting the dog work out whatever it needs to work out. The dog places a paw on her chest. Nunez recognizes the gesture as the moment in which the dog accepts her in a way it hadn’t to that point. On an important level, she is officially in Apollo’s pack, maybe even his leader.

It's a strange scene, and as a dog lover, one I recognize. I remember the times a dog has placed a paw on me in a similar way, and I found it charming. Still, Nunez’s scene strikes me as fictional, something concocted to dramatize the new, deeper connection between her and Apollo, the mystical acceptance by the dog of its new owner. Yes, dogs do this type of maneuver, but to glean a moment of heightened recognition between dog and owner out of such a gesture, to me, reads like something made up. It doesn’t feel like reality. He probably just wanted a treat.

And why shouldn’t the scene strike me as made up? It’s a novel. Unlike My Struggle, this work of autofiction isn’t coy about its nature, proclaiming “A Novel” on its cover. The problem for me isn’t that Nunez is fictionalizing. It’s that the autofiction form lives or dies on my sense that I’m not reading fiction. The bond Nunez has created with me through the telling of her personal, memoir-like story about her life as a writer—her past experiences with her dead author friend, her discussions about student manuscripts in her classes, her experiences owning this big dog in Manhattan—takes precedence over any use of the imaginative in her work. If I perceive something in the text as imaginative, I’m pulled out of that bond, and I start to question my relationship to the work. Is this scene made up? Are all the scenes made up?

The sense that the writer is telling me the real story of her experiences offers me the voyeuristic treat of getting to peek behind the curtain of a successful writer’s life—or really the life of any successful person. With my sudden questioning of this scene, I now have some doubt whether Nunez had a relationship with the dead author, whether she lived in Manhattan, whether she teaches classes and is successful in the field, whether she even owned a dog. Maybe the story doesn’t convey at all what it’s like to have any of these things. Perhaps foolishly, I’ve counted on this novel to represent something closer to reality. Still, I feel like I’ve been led down the path of memoir.

My options are to blame myself for this transgression or to blame the author. As easy as it would be to blame Nunez, after my experience with Knausgaard, it’s probably time I start taking more responsibility for my role. She calls it a novel right there on the cover. Why do I read it as memoir?

Reading autofiction as memoir might be my default mode, but there are rare occasions when an autofiction writer pulls me out my reading approach. Rachel Cusk’s Outline, the first in her series of autofiction works, aspires to a level of transcendence I don’t typically associate with autofiction. Instead of relying on the sense that she’s offering me a peek at her life, Cusk uses a story that feels memoir-like to tell us something deeper about life in a way I associate with the best fiction.

On the first page of the narrative, Cusk’s protagonist “Faye”—who much like Cusk is a published fiction writer of some renown—has lunch at a London pub with a billionaire. She wonders what the billionaire might want with her attention. She writes, “A lot of people want to be writers: there was no reason to think you couldn’t buy your way into it.” Like most autofiction titles, Cusk lures us in with a scene straight out of the Lifestyles of the Writerly Rich and Famous. She’s sitting at a London pub having lunch with a billionaire and discussing writing. The writing aspect barely even matters. A billionaire is just plain old rich and famous. We’re given a window into a world that, on some level, many non-billionaires like me are interested in.

Then Cusk drops on us this aphorism worthy of Jane Austen about buying your way into becoming a writer. It’s not the kind of line I associate with Knausgaard or Nunez. She’s using our interest in a life in which we have some curiosity and makes a hard turn toward the ineffable, offering us some wry commentary that abandons the more pedestrian voyeurism I typically get from autofiction. She’s telling us about the world in a way I associate with novelists from the literary past. She’s not, when it comes down to it, writing autofiction. She’s writing fiction in the more classic, traditional sense of Austen et al. and merely using the trappings of autofiction to lure us in.

This assessment is backed up by the rest of Outline. Faye is visiting Greece to teach a creative writing seminar in English, and she meets Ryan, another teacher in the program, at a café. Again, we’re privy to the conversation of elites in their field. Ryan has a book contract and a lecturer position in his hometown of Dublin, and he’s engaged to be married. His coming nuptials don’t keep him from leering at their waitress, and he even suggests he and Faye might like to go for a swim together later. We’re meant to notice, if not Ryan’s bad behavior, its portents in his actions and words. It’s impossible not to wonder, is this what it’s like to be flown in to teach at one of these writing seminars in an exotic location? Are these writer-teacher-men taking advantage of the situation to play around? Welcome to Lifestyles of the Writerly Rich and Famous!

But Cusk doesn’t settle for such easy sentiments. They’re merely the trailer that gets you to see the movie. Ryan has a brother of roughly the same age who has a mental condition. The brother bounces back and forth between their parents’ home and care institutions. Ryan says that his parents don’t take much pride in Ryan’s achievements, any more than they take blame for his brother’s condition. Cusk writes, “What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.” Who, on some level, can’t relate to an obsession with our failures and having to constantly convince ourselves of our successes? Cusk is not merely passing along a gossipy scene featuring the bad behavior of a professional. She’s offering genuine insights into life, which much of autofiction seems intent on forgoing. This passage strikes me as hard-won wisdom that extends far beyond the hoi polloi of the literary set. At moments like these, Cusk’s work transcends the surface concerns of life and offers something more relevant to our souls. That’s not a decision most autofiction writers typically make, or can make. They’re more likely to rely on the sense of memoir to ensure reader engagement.

Cusk makes such decisions again and again in her work. Later, on something of a date with another rich man—again of questionable character—Faye describes the relationship of her two sons and the way it changed during the time leading up to her divorce from their father. The boys loved each other unconditionally until they started focusing too much on facts to settle grievances. Cusk writes, “[W]hen peace becomes war, when love turns to hate, something is borne into the world, a force of pure mortality. If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.” What started as a conversation between two people about the struggles of marriage and family dovetails into insights about not just love and hatred, but their pronounced effects on the world. Cusk might start where many autofiction writers make their hay, but she has different goals, and she succeeds at making her story bigger than itself. I’m not wondering whether Cusk herself is divorced or has children or had a date with a man in Greece. I don’t much care. I’m thinking about individual love and hatred writ large. That’s not typically where I go when reading autofiction.

The sense of fiction, as opposed to memoir, in Outline is backed up by the many conversations between characters in the book. The lengths of the conversations in particular feel exaggerated to me, to the point that I’m never left wondering if the conversation actually happened. One conversation occurs between Faye, Patoinis, and Angeliki in a restaurant in Athens. Patoinis, a divorced father, tells a long story about a trip with his kids into the mountains that goes awry, and he expresses regret about his divorce from their mother, suggesting it’s why his children eventually left him and emigrated to America. Angeliki has none of it.

“[W]hat are you saying? That your children emigrated because their parents got divorced? My friend, I’m afraid you’re mistaken for thinking you’re that important. Children leave or stay depending on their ambitions: their lives are their own. Somehow we’ve become convinced that if we say even a word out of place, we’ve marked them forever, but of course that is ridiculous, and in any case, why should their lives be perfect? It is our own idea of perfection that plagues us, and [it] is rooted in our own desires. For instance, my mother thinks that the greatest misfortune is to be an only child. She simply cannot accept that my son will not have brother and sisters, and I’m afraid I’ve given her the impression that this situation has not come about by choice, as a way to avoid talking to her about it all the time. But she’s always telling me about this doctor or that doctor she’s just heard of, who can work miracles; the other day…”

The dialog is penetrating. I’m fascinated by how much parents might impact their children, how mine might have impacted me, and the ridiculousness of the idea of a perfect life. Cusk’s insights are impacting my beliefs as I read, literally changing them as the sentences unravel, but one thing I never believe is that this conversation actually happened.

This is not a criticism of the work. Faye, Patoinis, and Angeliki are all fascinatingly drawn characters, but they talk in a way that suggests artifice. Their individual contributions to the conversation go on for extended periods. No one seems capable of interrupting the other, and the entire conversation is over 40 pages. I can appreciate a good dinner conversation, but this isn’t typically how they go.

Cusk’s dialog reminds me of the film My Dinner with Andre. I loved this film, felt like it changed my DNA when I originally saw it, but despite its verisimilitude, I knew it was art, something manipulated to make me feel a certain way. We’re not eavesdropping on a real conversation. We’re listening to finely wrought dialog that gets beyond eavesdropping to the matters that affect us beyond the covers of a book. That’s what Cusk is doing. Is the book about Cusk’s real life? Did this happen? Who cares?

To me, Cusk doesn’t write autofiction. She writes what decades ago would’ve simply been called semi-autobiographical fiction, or roman a clef. She relies on the feel of a memoir only to the point that this choice allows you into her work, and once you’re there, she transcends the form by offering aphorisms and insights that help the reader understand people and life. “Will you buy the next installment of this story?” is a less important question than “Are you getting something valuable from this one?”

I understand why Knausgaard, Nunez, and Cusk write autofiction. They choose a form with decades of history as a compelling means to communicate story to readers. On the surface, writing autofiction is a fantastic choice for engaging readers like me. You seemingly write about your personal life and feelings much the same way someone writes memoir. The fictional form allows you, consciously or otherwise, to adjust the narrative to make the story more compelling—so long as you avoid making it feel too much like fiction—and you don’t go out of your way to interrupt your audience’s impression that they’re reading memoir. In the end, you’ve done your first job as a book writer, which is to engage your reader. If there’s a sin in this process, it’s a forgivable one.

Still, autofiction veers the reader’s attention away from the more metaphorical aspects of story as typically practiced in fiction writing and, like a memoir, places more focus on whether what happens in the story actually happened in real life. In this way, the story goes from being about a protagonist to being about a real person, but the reader has different expectations for stories about real people, one of which is that the things that happen in the story seem like real life.

I don’t know when I started describing my first memoir My Iliad Odyssey, which is available now for preorder, as a hybrid memoir, but I know why. It came after having failed at a previous attempt to publish a more traditional memoir about my time as the bass player of the Refreshments.

The process of writing this previous memoir had been difficult for me. I couldn’t get past the idea that despite achieving some impressive career goals—two-album deal with Mercury Records, hit single, prime time TV theme song—not many memoir-worthy events happened. Yes, there were career highs, and lows that led to my quitting the band after that two-album deal expired. But having something happen to you and having something memoir worthy happen to you are two different things. It was a fairly eventful period for me with our song on MTV, touring the country in an air-brushed bus, and playing music for at times thousands of folks, but none of that made me Paul McCartney or Gene Simmons or Sting or Flea. I was a guy who played bass in a band that had some moderate success in the mid-1990s. Moderate—not a word that sells a memoir.

In 2020, when I decided to try long-form nonfiction again, I knew it was time to get away from the subject of my band life. I’d been obsessed with fiction for 30 years, both reading and writing it, and I wanted to write about my literary experience somehow. I wanted to clarify, to myself and to anyone who might read it, why I’d started down this path, to reveal what reading and writing books had given me and what they still might have to give. With my ultimately deflating fiction publishing experiences, it frankly wasn’t feeling like much. Maybe it was finally time to take up a hobby that led to more sunshine and less computer time. Maybe my efforts to become a published novelist were coming to a close.

Searching for answers, I found on my bookshelf a copy of Homer’s the Iliad, which I’d never read. How could that be? I’d read Homer’s the Odyssey, and had at least tried most every other book I’d identified somewhat randomly as valuable to the western canon. But the Iliad just sat there on my shelf for a decade or two, no doubt bought during an optimistic moment 10 or 20 years ago and all but forgotten.

I would finally read the Iliad, but I would approach the reading of this work differently. I would set aside two hours a week, Sunday from 9 to 11 AM, for the slow, focused study of this cornerstone of world literature and allow the process to take me wherever it might, whether that meant the ultimate answer to my reading and writing conundrums or the abandonment of books entirely.

This effort, spanning three years and two different Iliad translations, was so revelatory that I wrote a memoir about it, but unlike my band life, this memoir was on a subject at which I couldn’t even fool myself into thinking I was an expert. No Ph.D., no traditional book publication after two decades of diligent effort. I was just a guy who liked to read classics and took them seriously. What could I do to make my memoir more interesting to readers?

My first known experience with hybrid memoir came when I read Meghan O’Gieblyn’s God, Human, Animal, Machine, which came out in 2021. The book features O’Gieblyn’s interest in the Singularity, which is, among other things, a philosophy some tech-interested Christians view as the fulfillment of the prophecy of “Revelations” from the Bible. In short, internet technology will advance to a point that we’ll be able to upload ourselves to “heaven”—or some kind of super server that will store our souls in an ideal state forever. O’Gieblyn, a professor, former Bible college student, and columnist for Wired, might be the perfect writer to explore this concept, and she does so through the tried-and-true lens of great western thinkers such as René Descartes, John Calvin, and Søren Kierkegaard. A key to the success of her book is the fact that O’Gieblyn herself struggles with wanting a path back to the “re-enchantment” of her earlier pious days. In the book, she approaches the Singularity as though it might be that path.

As much as I loved God, Human, Animal, Machine and think you should read it, for this post, I’m most interested in the fact that the book is what I would call a hybrid memoir.

What’s a hybrid memoir? I couldn’t find what felt like a complete definition, but a few have danced around the topic. Writer Adriana Barton describes the hybrid memoir writing process as “bridging the gap between research and personal experience.” Writer Courtney Maum describes “hybrid projects” as “books that take you up close and personal with the author, then zoom out to visit the larger world that the story is taking place in.” Book Page offers, “Hybrid memoirs mix the author’s personal story with broader explorations of history, science, social science, criticism or spirituality.” That last one is pretty close to what O’Gieblyn is doing in her book, but I find all of these definitions—if that’s what they are—limited.

For example, Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener offers a narrative of the author’s time working at a dotcom in the early aughts. Through her eyes, we witness the internet industry grow into something like its terrible teens. No other book that I’ve read so deftly paints what it must’ve been like in those days to listen to electronica on your headphones while changing the world one customer support bill at a time and wondering how much your company stock options might be worth at the moment. I suppose the Book Page definition’s mention of “social science” accounts for Wiener’s title as a hybrid memoir, though I suspect business or finance might just as aptly describe its nonfiction contents.

If Uncanny Valley is a hybrid memoir, the same can be said for The Happily Ever After, in which Avi Steinberg chronicles the world of romance writing and publishing from the vantage of his decision to forgo literary fiction and instead make the jump to writing romance novels. Offering an enthralling dip into an unfamiliar field—for me, romance novels—feels like a key hybrid memoir feature. If you’re reading something that feels very much like a memoir but you’re also learning a great deal about some other aspect of society, then by my definition, you’re reading a hybrid memoir.

Beyond this combination of personal narrative and nonfiction exploration, I’ve noticed a range of other similarities in hybrid memoirs.

1)    The hybrid memoir author is accomplished in their field without being famous in the broadest writerly sense.

Meghan O’Gieblyn teaches writing at Upper Iowa University. Avi Steinberg is a lecturer at the University of Chicago. Anna Wiener is a tech correspondent for The New Yorker. They are respected professionals in their field, have impressive credentials, and probably aren’t starving. That said, no one would mistake any of them for Zadie Smith, Stephen King, or J.K. Rowling. As someone who was once in a band that had a top 12 hit on alternative radio (doesn’t quite have that “top 10” ring, does it?), it’s easy to see how these folks wound up forgoing the more traditional memoir. They’re also not Sting or Flea or Gene Simmons or Paul McCartney. No matter how great their books might be—and they’re all really great—there was no reason that books by these particular authors might sell well.

Of course, fame isn’t the only way to succeed as a memoirist, and maybe not even the main way. Some folks simply have deeply compelling stories that make great memoir material. These are often people who have managed to succeed in life despite deeply tragic circumstances, and they often go on to become great writers. I’m thinking of Maya Angelou, who suffered rape as a child and still became one of the shining lights of the literary world; or Dave Eggers, who lost both of his parents in a span of five weeks to cancer and still managed to become a leader of his own generation of writers; or Frank McCourt, who came from abject poverty to write one of the most successful memoirs of all time. Mary Karr, Cheryl Strayed, and Roxanne Gay all suffered mightily in their early years for things that were entirely out of their control, and they all managed to turn their stories into compelling memoirs. Even though these writers weren’t famous at the time, there was no need for them to consider a hybrid memoir. What they had to tell and the way they told it was plenty to sustain a readership. Fame aside, the weight of the story can be enough.

2)    The hybrid memoir author has a compelling personal story without it being an overly-dramatic personal story.

You’ll notice I didn’t describe my process with the Iliad as some kind of over-the-top attempt to get to the heart of the work by reading it back-to-back several times, or by traveling to the ancient world to uncover details about the text through the meticulous exploration of the sites thought to appear in the book, or by my exhaustive reading of every word of criticism of Homer’s title to uncover the secret to its cultural endurance. Those efforts might be dramatic and interesting, but they’re not me. I was just someone who was struggling with aspects of my literary life and wanted to see if Homer could offer me some guidance. It is, in its way, a simpler story than some kind of gung-ho personal dive into Homer’s work and world. Such approaches don’t really speak to my concerns, though I’d probably read and enjoy someone else’s memoir with that approach.

This more grounded perspective is a prominent feature of the hybrid memoir. While all of the hybrid memoirists mentioned above have interesting and troubling personal concerns in relation to their subjects, you wouldn’t mistake any of them for gonzo journalists. They’re simply living their lives, having their problems, making their decisions, and seeing if those decisions help them with their problems. O’Gieblyn’s crisis of spirit in God, Human, Animal, Machine couldn’t be more compelling to me, but no one would mistake her for Apostle Paul, who used to beat Christian slaves until on the road one day he was blinded by a vision of God. Anna Wiener in Uncanny Valley had provocative and fraught run-ins in the tech world that eventually led to a nice payday, but it’s not like she went from typing away at some internet cafe to billionaire status. Avi Steinberg clearly struggled with leaving behind literary work for the romance field, but no one would mistake his struggles with the likes of, say, Jack Kerouac, who suffered deeply from alcoholism and mental illness to the point that it ruined his life. These aren’t people who have some ultra-compelling angle from which to write a memoir, and they don’t strike me as people making dramatic choices in their lives to have something to write about. They’re simply people who, like most of us, have pursued happiness and run into roadblocks. To create a compelling hybrid memoir, the stakes don’t need to be any higher than that, so long as you also include the nonfiction element.

3)    The hybrid memoir author employs the nonfiction aspect of the book to “make up for” the lack of a more compelling memoir storyline.

This sounds like a dig, but it isn’t. If you’re not a famous person, or if your specific travails don’t elevate to the level that immediately interest memoir readers, then it behooves you to consider including some fact-based aspect in your memoir that speaks to your issues and—in a story sense—“makes up for” the lack of a more dramatic memoir storyline.

You can come at the problem from the other way, too. A Ph.D. scholar with some flare for personal narrative might turn their dissertation into a hybrid memoir.

The key is that the two aspects of the book have to meld into something that feels complete. The form sits conveniently in between hardcore nonfiction and blog. The steps to participate in the genre are no doubt challenging, but they’re reachable for writers with both skillsets.

My own struggles along these lines started with the fact that, despite my deep devotion to reading and writing, I’m a hopelessly slow reader, and my efforts to publish my fiction traditionally had yielded almost nothing over 20 years. These are painful aspects of my life, but let’s face it: as problems, they’re first-world.

In order to fill out my memoir, I also included a book-by-book chronicling and analysis of the Iliad, which is a classic many have skipped. It was a great project for me because my slow reading of the book yielded a deep love for it, and I realized how many more classics I didn’t appreciate in the past because of my impatience with getting through them. Classics aren’t supposed to be consumed and forgotten about. They have very specific gifts that you can’t get anywhere else in the world, but you have to know how to unwrap them. For me, I have to unwrap them slowly. It’s the only way to get my mind to a place where I can appreciate them. This insight was revelatory for me, and it led to a renewed appreciation of my reading and writing life.

The other hybrid memoirists I mention above also tell us a great deal about some aspect of the world that speaks directly to their troubles. I’d never heard of the Singularity before I’d come across O’Gieblyn’s work, and I found myself fascinated by people like the author, who look to technology as a possible answer to life’s deepest questions. Anna Wiener reveals in Uncanny Valley the weird combination of excitement and work-a-day office life that must’ve been normal in internet work culture around that time. Avi Steinberg uncovers more about the romance publishing industry than I thought I wanted to know, but after I started his book, I did want to know. As one example, the romance publishing industry sells so many books that people in that industry don’t call it the romance publishing industry. They call it the publishing industry. If writers of other genres are allowed into the game, it’s because romance book sales are insurance against the potential losses from these other ventures.

Through the nonfiction aspect of these hybrid memoirs, I come away with a deeper understanding of a world that runs parallel to my own, and I’m more fascinated by the world going forward. I also come away empathizing with the specific struggles of these authors, and as with any good protagonist, I’m compelled to follow them in their plight.

4)    The author of the hybrid memoir must sincerely engage with the nonfiction aspect of the book.

The main reasons these hybrid memoirs work is the fact that their authors are true believers, by which I mean they genuinely look to their respective subjects to answer important questions. O’Gieblyn’s interest in the Singularity comes from a deep desire to rekindle the majesty of religion in her, the sense that there is something of an afterlife for us. Why can’t the Great Answer be encompassed by digital technology? Wiener not only recognizes a work life and future career plan in her tech job, she also thinks, at least in the beginning, that this technology is transforming the world in extremely positive ways. Steinberg admits that he’d always secretly wished that Anna Karenina had a happy ending, prompting him to look more seriously at the romance genre as a career path. None of the above authors seem to be dabbling. They each approach their subjects with the deep hope that it will resolve their issues. This sincere approach is at the heart of what for me makes their books so worthwhile.

5)    The hybrid memoir need not have a prescribed ending.

Remember what I said earlier about conventional memoirists having these ultra-compelling stories? Well, they need to come out on top of them. When folks are struck with the worst possible experiences in their lives, there is no hope in reading their story in a way that suggests they were defeated by their experiences. If you’ve suffered major trauma such as sexual assault, the loss of a parent during your childhood, or something like chronic addiction, the memoir form seems to require that you overcome these obstacles. The triumph over such difficult straits is the ultimate point of these stories. The people who relate to them need to see that the writer has managed to get past their issues and thrive in their wake. Like the romance genre, the happily-ever-after moment at the end of a conventional memoir is all but required. Show me one that doesn’t—say, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion—and I’ll show an author who was famous in the first place.

That’s not the case with hybrid memoirs. These writers’ very real but ultimately less traumatic experiences leave open the possibility to other types of endings. Without giving anything away—because I hope you read her book—at the end of God, Human, Animal, Machine, O’Gieblyn seems as confused as ever about her disenchantment. At the end of Uncanny Valley, Wiener has not resolved her issues with the tech world and her feelings about her time at the dotcom. And has Steinberg ever succeeded as a romance writer? From what I can tell, he’s never published a romance novel. Succeeding at it wasn’t the point of his book (though it no doubt would’ve been nice for him).

So, what is? What is the ultimate point of these types of hybrid memoirs? I think it’s witnessing someone going through a broadening of their understanding of themselves in relation to some aspect of the world around them. Each author goes into what is for them a new facet of world, with all of the excitement and mystery inherent in such a journey. Will this new thing serve as the answer to their problems? The books are almost like little scientific experiments. The author has a problem x, applies possible new solution y, and sees if this new approach works for solution z.

With the hybrid memoir, not solving the problem isn’t a dealbreaker. You suspect that would be the easy answer. What’s more important in these books is the effort to expand the author’s mind to include the wisdom and drawbacks of this new facet as it relates to their condition. The hybrid memoir works when the reader is also learning about some new aspect of the world right along with the author. We learn about this new aspect and wonder whether it might or might not apply to us. In all of the above books, I was never convinced that the authors’ attempted solutions would work for me, but I did follow along with deep curiosity, so deep that it’s hard not to wonder if I was more invested in their plights than I thought.

Possibly, but it doesn’t have to be that way. If something works for them, maybe a deeper search of the world would yield something that might work for me. If these memoirs have taught me anything, it’s that there’s still plenty room for creative thinking in the world, and perhaps a little hope as well.  

My new memoir My Iliad Odyssey is available for preorder. Your signed copy will ship this summer. Order here.

Here is the blurb of the book:

At a dead end as a fiction reader and writer, Art Edwards found on his bookshelf a used copy of the Iliad, which he’d never read. He set aside two hours a week, Sunday from 9 to 11 a.m., for the slow, focused study of this cornerstone of the western canon. He would allow the process to take him wherever it would, whether that meant the ultimate answer to his reading and writing conundrums or the abandonment of the practices entirely.

My Iliad Odyssey reveals Edwards’s journey into the heart of Homer. Composed of a modern, at times humorous retelling of the classic work, each chapter prompts a look beyond Troy into some bigger, often personal aspect of Edwards’s life or the world around him. During his three years of meticulously reading the Iliad, he saw his mother pass away from cancer, resolved decades-long frustrations with his former music colleagues, and found a new focus for his creative pursuits. He went to the Iliad to save his fiction reading and writing life, but like any Greek myth, the rewards weren’t what he expected them to be.

I haven’t published a book for over a decade. This is a big deal for me.

What’s kept me from publishing a book for so long? A lack of enthusiasm about the process.

With each of my three self-published novels, the process held some magic.

With Novel 1 in 2003, it was my first ever book.

With Novel 2 in 2008, there was a sense that I could build upon the 500 folks who had bought Novel 1.

Novel 3 in 2014 was my first clear novel in terms of length (83,000 words). It was also my least autobiographical novel, and the first one I’d crowd sourced.

In each instance, there was a feeling I was getting somewhere by self-publishing my books. That feeling made it worth jumping through the self-publishing hoops to make the books a reality.

Since then, not so much.

I’ve finished three more books in the past decade. With each I wanted to take the step to traditional publication. You know, have someone write me a check for the rights to publish it and do the grunt work to bring it to life. I’d tried to entice traditional publishing with Novels 1-3 as well, but once that didn’t happen, I could find some consolation in self-publication. With these latter three books, I couldn’t find the part of me that might get something out of the process, so I didn’t do it.

But now I’ve found something that makes it worth it.

With my creation of the DANOTI approach, I’m excited again about self-publication. Why? Because it’s an opportunity to show myself and anyone who might pay attention what I really value about reading and writing. What I value is the special communication books foster from writer to reader. This is the communication process I discovered during my formative reading experiences as a late teenager and college student, and it’s the one I still practice today.

I wasn’t much of a reader in grade school or high school, but as a college undergrad, I took to it with the passion of a zealot. Reading for me was more than entertainment. It was a path to personal, emotional, and spiritual enrichment that I couldn’t get anywhere else. Reading books—important books—became my religion. I wanted to read all of them, or as many as my admittedly slow and poor reading skills would allow. I’m still that person trying to read all of the important books to get what I can from them.

Beyond what I’ve already written on the subject, I don’t have much to add about the narrowing of literary culture at he careerist level in the current era. It’s not the space I want my books to occupy, so I’m taking back my publishing process from the institutions of the field.

How?

My Iliad Odyssey is published DANOTI-style—or not caring about anything but communicating what I can to whoever might find my book. In short, I will adhere to the following principles during the process:

No careerism.

No ebooks.

No International Standard Book Number (ISBN).

Little marketing.

This approach will lead to whatever readership it leads to, and that will be enough.

So, I’m enthused again about publishing.

Help me make DANOTI a viable new publishing avenue. Preorder My Iliad Odyssey, and I’ll get your copy out to you this summer.

As an ideology, DANOTI is clear enough.

There are wide implications to adopting DANOTI in any aspect of life, but I’m particularly interested in what it might mean for book publishing.

If you’ve followed my posts for the last year or two, you know that I've struggled with contemporary issues surrounding both traditional book publishing and self-publishing.

In short, with traditional publishing, I don’t like the increased number of filters that get in the way of communication from writer to reader. Creative writing programs, agents, editors, marketing departments, sensitivity readers, political activists—that’s several too many.

With self-publishing, I don’t like the shift in literary culture that focuses on fulfilling customers as opposed to readers. In short, self-publishing has become synonymous with publishing genre work on the internet. That’s not work that typically appeals to me.

Traditional and self-publishing are the two prominent ways to publish your work in 2025. Having to choose between these two unattractive approaches (if you’re lucky enough to get to choose) is a big reason why I haven’t published a book in over a decade.

I propose a third way, the DANOTI way.

From my perspective, adopting a DANOTI approach to the publication of your book allows the writer/publisher to ignore the downsides—as I see them—of both traditional and self-publishing. Both of these paths are fine for what they are. I’ve pursued both. If you want to pursue them, go for it.

The DANOTI approach as it applies to book publishing ignores all of the secondary aspects that tend to dominate discussion in contemporary book publishing and focuses instead on authors connecting with individual readers through the contents of their books. For example:

There is no careerism in DANOTI.

The way to speak directly to readers is to speak directly to readers and not to the institutions that currently dictate which authors have careers and which won’t. The shift of writer attention from the impact of their words on the reader to the impact of their words on the institutions of publishing has gotten consistently worse for at least a hundred years, and it’s only moved in one direction. I believe we’re now stuck with a traditional publishing industry that kowtows to the values of its corporate parent companies and/or social media, the latter often serving as the watchdog of the former.

You can, of course, skip these drawbacks with the traditional market and go for a self-publishing career through Amazon or some other digital outlet. The self-publishing realm also comes with drawbacks. In this realm, the author is too submissive to the whims of the customer as opposed to the wishes of the reader to create work that enriches them and doesn’t just take their time.

The only way out of these problems is to remove the need for a career from the process of writing and publishing. A writer’s ability to communicate honestly and directly with readers is hindered too much by opposing values that focus instead on making sure no group is offended, or that the conventions expected by the customer are adhered to. You can’t communicate to individual readers on a deep level when you’re focused on communicating to groups, or abiding by rote conventions. Get rid of career aspirations, and you can get back to writing for readers as opposed to the institutions and conventions that dictate in this day and age who has a career and who doesn’t.

There are no International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs) in DANOTI.

This is the barcode on the back of books used by a company called BookScan to track book sales. ISBNs tracking offers the industry some idea of which books are selling and which aren’t. These sales don’t reveal which books are connecting with readers. There are too many other competing reasons why these books might be selling, and practitioners of DANOTI aren’t interested in those reasons. They’re interested in communicating to readers.

There are no ebooks in DANOTI.

The DANOTI approach seeks to remove barriers between readers and the contents of books. Ebooks include the impediment of Amazon or another digital portal in between the reader and the book’s contents. Whether people who read ebooks care about this impediment or not, it violates private reading experiences. DANOTI works are not made to foster monitored experiences. They are made to be read by readers who value fewer filters and impediments between writer and reader.

There is little to no traditional marketing of DANOTI works.

The forms of marketing relied on for book marketing these days have been greatly impacted by people not concerned with the deep communication of the contents of books to readers. These people can be concerned with an endless list of other things: their careers, political correctness, self-promotion, being mean.

DANOTI works are not interested in promotion for these concerns. The type of book reading that interests DANOTI writers is done one person at a time. To the DANOTI writer, how a book might impact a group of readers isn’t important. What matters is how the work impacts an individual reader. Each reader is an individual with their own relationship to the book and world. Individuals respond to works differently than when they’re in groups. DANOTI practitioners focus on conveying their works to readers, not groups of readers.

DANOTI writers and publishers are not concerned with writing for any group. They’re individuals who are concerned with writing for individuals, all of whom are different. They aspire to have readers who have private relationships with their works and are touched deeply by the contents of their books.

The marketing of a work is inherently about making the work public. Leaving behind the careerist aspects of the publishing industry means you don’t have to do any marketing that might violate the private relationship between the reader and the work.

Those are the prominent aspects of DANOTI as it applies to book publishing. It’s really about getting past all the sound and fury surrounding publishing and getting back to the only thing that matters: the special way books communicate from writer to reader.

Enjoy my new song DANOTI at Bandcamp and Spotify, and maybe think about how we can improve our lives by practicing this simple dictum.