When writers talk about books . . .

A few months back, a friend (??) invited me to talk to his book club about Leopards Kill, and after much consideration I did what I always do when I've had too much to drink: I mumbled "what the hell." Under most circumstances that's a safe thing to say, but it proved fatal here.

The day of reckoning looms tomorrow . . . the worst thing is that they set the session up for early in the morning, so there is no way to appear not incoherent*, unless I stay up all night and drink copious amounts of coffee beforehand, in which case I'll come off like a caffeined-out incoherent zombie madman, which may or may not be an improvement over my regular self.


Writers are always at a disadvantage when they're talking about books, or at least about their books. For one thing, it's generally been a long time since you've written the damn thing -- in this case it's almost two years -- and unless you're the type who memorizes what you write (some of us are quite obsessed), you're bound to forget a few things . . .

Like the name of the main character and the plot.

It's not so much that I forget; it's just that I mix these things up with the book I'm working on now, or the ones in between. So all of a sudden I'm talking about Romania, pro wrestlers and World War II, when I should be talking about Afghanistan and the Heart of Darkness.

There's also the fact that a book is always a much different experience for the writer than it is for the reader. I don't mean just in the sense that everyone gets something different out of a book. Well I do mean that, but that's just a small part of it. Writing is a physical act of sensory deprivation and self-induced lunacy -- to do it, you sit in a room and talk to yourself all day. Or in my case you pace madly around the room and rant to the gods, kick the furniture and wonder where you left your coffee cup. For a writer, a book is journey out of chaos -- you wander from incoherency and mass confusion to something that, hopefully, is a focused tale that evokes both emotion and thought in the reader. It's the journey that's interesting, not the destination; discovery is the reason you keep doing it over and over. I never really know what a book is about until I'm working on it, and even then sometimes I only consciously know small parts of what it's about. It's that act of searching, and the surprise that comes with it, that makes it worth doing again and again and again.

At least that's my excuse.

But wandering around a room and running your head against the wall until something comes loose is not what the book is "about" for a reader. And while I certain read books, there's no way I can ever really be a reader of my own books. I don't know what it's like to read them, any more than I know what it's like to write Moby Dick or Sheila Does the Nasty with a Goat. I can talk about the themes and things I was interested in, the things I learned writing the book, but I have to figure -- hope, maybe -- that the book is a much better statement of those things than anything I can say in a few minutes, hours or even days.

Which I guess means that I better pack something stronger than Starbucks for the meeting. It's in New Jersey, at least . . . . the gun laws are comparatively lax.

*not incoherent = a much lower standard of coherence than "merely coherent," and not to be confused with understandable