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markmerlis.com |
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man about town started as one of a pair of related novellas about the ‘60s and the ‘90s, but wound up big (or padded) enough to stand on its own. I hate trying to sum up what my books are about (“See, it’s sort of set in the Trojan war, except…”), but here goes. Joel, a middle-aged nebbish who works for Congress, is dumped by his lover of fifteen years and hurled back into the world, where he must deal with demons who were supposed to be dead but were only sleeping. The book has a lot of watch-the-sausage-being-made congressional stuff, a complicated interracial romance, and a sort of detective story: a hunt for a man whom Joel glimpsed once as a boy and who, Joel imagines, holds the key to everything. This is the first of my books to be set in the present day and told from the point of view of a man not unlike me, except a little crazier. At one point it even had a lot of autobiographical material, the usual growing-up-gay shtick, most of which has wound up on the cutting-room floor. While a lot of writers—maybe gay writers especially—are at their best when drawing on their own experience, I find that my past is an empty well. I think I write more believably when I tell a bunch of lies about some people who never existed. I have returned to the abandoned stepsister novella—working title, The Anarch—which I suspect will also grow into a novel. This one will have incest, Vietnam, and other neat stuff. I always imagine, when I start a new project—making the silly but sacred promise to spend the next few years of my life fleshing out some idea that came to me while I was standing in line at the bank machine—that this time, this time I have found the story that will let me say what I mean. Of course the whole enterprise, the real work of writing fiction, consists of finding out why I thought it was a good idea in the first place. |