Writers gone wild.

by rdjahn

Writers Gone Wild: The Feuds, Frolics, and Follies of Literature’s Great Adventurers, Drunkards, Iconoclasts, and Misanthropes by Bill Peschel came out earlier this month.

I haven’t finished it, but I’m going to go ahead and recommend it as a great holiday gift anyway, as it’s not a book you have to read straight through — one taste and you know whether you like it, I think. It’s a series of tales about writers acting out – sometimes with good reason, sometimes not.

Also, if you’re someone who shits, and who isn’t, it will make a great bathroom book, as none of the stories is more than a page or two long. There’s nothing worse than bringing a novel into the bathroom, getting lost in a thirty-page chapter, and finding, when you try to stand an hour later, that your legs have fallen asleep and are completely numb. They collapse under you, you fall to the bathroom floor with your pants still around your ankles, and the day is ruined.

Amiright?

 Here is a typical, if rather short, sample (from page 38):

From her first book, Jacqueline Susann knew the value of self-promotion. She hustled booksellers, distributors, and journalists. She toured extensively. She was the first to visit the truck drivers who delivered her paperbacks at dawn, handing out pastries and signing books for them.

So, the week after her first book, Every Night, Josephine! was published, she went to her publisher for a meeting and found the entire staff around the television set. President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas.

Her response was characteristic. “Why the fuck does this have to happen to me? This is gonna ruin my tour.”