The Accidental Life by Terry McDonell

Author:Terry McDonell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-02T04:00:00+00:00

The indictment is more powerful because Malcolm never renders herself immune. She is, in this way, indefatigable. But so too is the truth, even when there are many truths.

−ENDIT−

Richard Ford (2,066)

Nobody gives a damn about a writer and his problems except another writer.

—HAROLD ROSS, FOUNDING EDITOR, THE NEW YORKER

I LEARNED AN IMPORTANT TRUTH about editing from Richard Ford, although my writing this will probably surprise him.

Richard called himself a white-buck southerner and liked to say he had some arrows in his ass, meaning it had not always been as easy as it looked—handsome novelist, beautiful wife; the Pulitzer and the PEN/Faulkner (an unprecedented double for Independence Day); the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As far as I knew, no one believed him about the arrows. He was important and somehow confounding—all that success!—but you wanted to be friends with him. At least I did.

I had admired his writing since discovering A Piece of My Heart, an audacious first novel with a fineness of language that caught something violent and unsettling about our generation. We were the same age, and I was in my first editing job at Outside. Richard had enlisted in the marines and tried teaching and law school, and picked up an MFA. After A Piece of My Heart came The Ultimate Good Luck but they were both small novels—“small” as in strong reviews, low sales. He figured there had to be at least some money in journalism and he liked sports, so he got a package of his writing together and sent it to Sports Illustrated. Word came back that he should stick to fiction, although when I checked years later, there was no record of this at SI, which I think annoyed Richard because the rejection had obviously piqued him.

Richard didn’t know what else to do but try another novel—maybe about a guy who’s a sportswriter with a glossy New York sports magazine you have all heard of. That sportswriter became Frank Bascombe, who says at one point, I had written all I was going to write…and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books. Amen to that, but not where Richard’s breakout 1986 novel, The Sportswriter, is concerned. Forget any silliness about Richard being tagged with “neo-Faulknerianism” (an early arrow): Frank Bascombe would evolve into your realtor as Everyman, although Richard doesn’t like that characterization.

People who knew Richard thought real estate had always been his context. Over the years he often owned several houses at the same time. He could give you sharp details on every house he’d lived in—in fourteen states, plus France and Mexico. The expatriated life—France, specifically—didn’t prove up, although he was sitting in a restaurant in Brittany when he learned that he had won the Pulitzer.

Richard moved so often not just because he could but because he was married to Kristina Hensley Ford, a striking urban planner with a doctorate from Michigan. Her career took them from

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