Books To Bury Me With: David Fitzgerald

The book I’d want to take with me to the grave:

In as much as I'm interpreting this first question to mean "what's your favoritest book of all the books" then my answer is pretty much always Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion. I gravitate strongly toward stories that are trying, for good or ill, to say at least a little something about everything - the big idea, big picture, big swing joints that either draw on mythic structures, or make their case so well as to join them. The external conflict between Hank and Lee Stamper houses so much of what it is to be a man – physical vs. intellectual, independence vs. community, head vs. heart – and the internal conflict that plays out in Viv makes for one of the richest and most beautifully realized women (and one of the most perfect endings) in all of literature. The prose is enchanting. The story is a barnburner. In as much as such a thing can exist (and in as much as we can still recall America as a good idea), I’d say it’s the closest thing we have to “the great American novel.” There’s no one I wouldn’t recommend it to.

 

Conversely, if the implication here is more “what book would you want to have with you to read for all eternity” then toss a KJV in the pine with me. I’ll never get bored, and I’ll likely need all the help I can get.

The first book that hit me like a ton of bricks:

Lolita feels like the right answer here. I read it in high school, in secret (which still feels deliciously appropriate – to anyone who hasn't read it, I highly recommend doing so without telling a soul), with an assist from one of those vanishingly rare English teachers who just did not give a fuck about anything (in my case, conservative Christian parents) that might stand between her students and the books they wanted to read. To my mind, Nabokov remains both the master of meaningful transgression, and the prose GOAT. Every sentence is like candy tempting you into the back of an unmarked van. I'd known I wanted to be a writer since I was in kindergarten, but it wasn't until I read Lolita that I first thought "I want to write like this."

The book that’s seen more of my tears, coffee stains, and cigarette burns:

I don't think a book has ever quite wrecked me like Never Let Me Go. Dystopias were an enormous part of my literary education, but up to this point they'd always felt nominally instructive; like worrying, but faraway warnings about the terrible things we all needed to work to prevent. It's barely worth noting that dystopian fiction has grown from a smallish, speculative subgenre into a leviathan sci-fi cottage industry, wholly consumed and commodified by the very future it hoped to prevent, but these books are nothing if not on the nose. The devastating brilliance of Ishiguro's is its cell-deep universality. Its vision isn’t about fascism, or religious militancy, or environmental collapse (though it deftly touches on all these), or any of the other once-distant fears we're now facing every day. It's quieter, and sadder than all that. It’s about growing up, and becoming self-aware, and coming to terms with the fact that most of us aren’t special, and won’t do much of anything to change the world. It makes, quite simply, a dystopia of everyday life.

The book that shook my world like a goddamn hurricane:

So there’s a telltale totebag of books I want to shout out here that worked in concert one Summer to change my entire worldview and my actual life. My high school girlfriend was an almost impossible anomaly in our small Southern town – already as righteously engaged a feminist firebrand as any woman I've known since – and when she lent me a starter kit that included Gloria Steinem's Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, and Inga Muscio's Cunt, (and when my aforementioned conservative Christian parents subsequently found that liberal motherlode and made me give it back), (and when I subsubsequently read them all anyway, on the sly, by flashlight after lights out), it marked the humble beginnings of my lefty radicalization. I remember being overwhelmed, again and again, both by the sheer scope of the injustice visited upon women throughout history, and perhaps even more, by just how much I’d never heard a word about it. I felt like I'd been living under a rock (of ages) in a parallel (divinely created) universe, where girls were quiet and sweet and by-and-large just happily waiting around to become wives and mothers (I was beyond thrilled to learn that there were in fact many who harbored no such interest, and that I was likewise under no obligation to become a father). If that Summer marked the first step in a lifetime of knowledge-seeking rebellion, these four indispensable works fired the starting gun.

The book I wish I’d discovered when my liver was still intact:

My liver's fine, but if we were to speak more broadly about substance abuse and addiction, Jesus' Son is the one I wish I'd found a little sooner. I don't know if it would've made a difference, but it definitely went a ways toward deromanticizing the lost and hopelessly drug-addled lifestyle I had, up to that point, kind of convinced myself was just "how artists live." I’ve often said that if I were the kind of person who carries one beloved, foxed and dogeared book around in their back pocket at all times, this would be the one. It’s about pocketsize, and open it to any page for any amount of time – even just waiting for a bus, or an elevator, or a beer – and it's guaranteed to be time well spent.

The book I’d shove into everyone’s hands if I were king of the world:

1984. This feels basic as fuck, so I’m not gonna write too much about it, but it’s still my answer. As long as we're still allowed to have and read books, it’s not too late to read 1984.

The book that nearly drove me to madness:

Molly did a number on me last year. I cried about it. I yelled about it. I made my wife read it and talk to me about it. I went to a reading in Atlanta and talked to Butler about it (he was incredibly kind). I wrote a 4,000 word essay about it, relating my own experiences with a (still living) suicidal ex, that sparked so much editorial infighting upon its first submission that it came back to me with more notes than I could manage and ultimately remains unpublished (to be clear, I have no hard feelings about this. I was a fucking mess over this book, and I honestly believe the outlet in question was protecting me as much as themselves). All of which is to say, now that the controversy dust has mostly settled, that Molly is a work of unfathomable pain and profound courage. Butler's willingness to write openly not just about his wife's suicide, but also her infidelity, and his own mental health struggles, were all taboo-shattering blows against the self-destructive traditions of strong/silent masculinity. By speaking out about things men almost never speak about, I don't mind saying here, he helped me to feel less alone in the world, which is I think the most any of us can hope for our writing to do.

The book I can’t keep my hands off of, no matter how many times I’ve read it:

I’m not a big rereader. Not because I don’t want to, so much as just because I’m slow, and there's still mountains of stuff I want to read for the first time. But when it comes to the books I have read more than once, The Sound and the Fury is far and away the leader of the pack. What Faulkner conjures between these four star-crossed lunatics is like lightning in a Klein bottle; an eternally cycling, metastatically mutating, perfect storm of familial dysfunction. Every time I read it, it feels completely different, and brand new. Just writing this makes me want to pick it up again.

The book I’d hide in the back of my closet, pretending I’m too highbrow for it:

I don't really read for guilty pleasure – again, I'm too slow, and still have too much on my list – but I’ve definitely opted not to buy a Roth at a used bookstore because I was afraid the hip young women at the checkout counter might judge me “part of the problem”, and Portnoy's Complaint is the lowest brow of his particular brand of problematic. But as outdated and indefensible as the “great literary man” can sometimes be, his first claim to fame is also kick-your-legs-in-the-air hysterical, and ruefully spot-on, even 50 years later, about the banal, pervy indignities lurking inside every male brain. Few books have ever made me laugh out loud so much, or feel so guilty about it afterwards.

The book that left a scar I wish I could forget:

The world is a terrible place. The world is a beautiful place. I hate people. I love people. I'm happy. I'm miserable. Many such opposite things can be true at once, and usually are. With that in mind, I’d describe The Elementary Particles as like reading all the worst things I’d ever thought about the nature of human existence, but with zero counterbalance. Just a slickly synthesized, and fairly convincing argument for the preening, victorious dark. Like your first sexual experience, or your first psychedelic trip, or your first mercilessly irreversible loss, this book is one with the power to divide things into "before" and "after." I wouldn’t say I regret it, but I also don’t often recommend it. Houellebecq’s hardly a secret anymore and I think the people who need him tend to find him on their own. For those who don’t, life’s hard enough already.

The author who made me think, "Now that’s a soul in torment":

I don’t think a day has passed since I first read Kafka that something in my day-to-day life hasn’t reminded me of Kafka. His intensely alienated body of work, combined with his well-documented lack of confidence in its merit, paint a clear portrait of a genius soul in crippling torment. I can only imagine what he’d think of the world we’re all trying to navigate today.

The book I’d get a tattoo of if I had the nerve:

Heh. So, the closest I've ever come to getting a tattoo was from Macbeth (though at the time, I’d actually misremembered it as being from Hamlet). I had plans to get "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and" in my own cursive handwriting, wound around my ankle so it read on and on forever, in tribute to my own stubborn commitment to not doing much of anything with my life at that time (but definitely planning to, eventually, ya know, after I was done getting high and bingeing Seinfeld for the tenth time or whatever). Thank Christ, I have a slight heart murmur from childhood surgery and was informed I’d need to see a doctor and take a course of antibiotics before I could get a tattoo, all of which struck me as way more trouble than it was worth, and thus never did. Needless to say, I am eternally grateful to my own laziness that I have only this embarrassing story to write about, rather than this far more embarrassing tattoo. I don't even like Macbeth all that much. If I were to get one now, it almost certainly would be something from Hamlet – for my money, the line-for-line greatest thing anyone’s ever written – something about dreams, or indecision, or loving complicated women badly. But I'd never get a tattoo. I’m 41 years old. It’s way too late for that shit.

The book that made me question everything I thought I knew:

Railing against my Christian upbringing, as some of my previous answers allude to, was kind of my defining characteristic for much of my youth (probably to the point of becoming pretty dull). But then along came The Diary of a Country Priest. I'll never forget reading the closing chapters of this book, around midnight, outside of a hospital ER after my wife woke up with some scary heart palpitations during the early days of Covid. They wouldn't let me accompany her inside, so I sat on a stone bench by the entrance and found myself moved, for one of the only times in memory, by a book to tears. Bernanos's exploration of traditionally Christian themes like faith and doubt, hope and despair, and the empathy he evokes while wrestling with them, borders on literary miracle. Everything turned out fine, but over the course of this dimly lit night of the soul, he opened my heart to ideas I’d shut out for the better part of two decades. It was by no means a come (back) to Jesus moment, but it did feel a bit like a resurrection, and it absolutely led me to start reexamining why I left in the first place, and reengaging with spiritual matters on my own terms – an ongoing project which has brought me to some of the most rewarding reading of my life.

The book that’s so damn good I’d never loan it out:

I'd loan anyone anything. I give books away as gifts all the time. That said, if something is super rare or valuable, it might at least give me pause. I loaned out a copy of Heiko Julien's delightful I Am Ready to Die a Violent Death several years ago (a book currently going for $140 used on Amazon), and while I still technically know where it is, I fear I may never see its safe return.

The book that’s been my companion through the darkest nights:

All the horrifying things Kafka makes me feel about living in the modern world, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland makes me feel like they're gonna be ok. Like, no matter how bad things get, it's all just a crazy, hallucinogenic dream and everyone I meet is just as fucked up and scared and confused as I am. Whether you need to eat or drink or smoke or sleep, run or fight or swell or shrink, Alice is the gift that keeps on giving. It's the only children's book I’ll never grow out of.

The book I’d throw in someone’s face during a heated argument:

This is another kind of basic bitch answer, but I feel like A People's History of the United States has the goods to win most of the kinds of arguments I'd get into if I were a more confrontational, book-throwing type of person.

The book that reminds me of a lost love or regret:

There are plenty of books I could choose with specific, personal associations on this subject, but as I've already overshared a good bit, let's go with Solaris – easily my favorite work of science fiction, and one of the greatest books in any genre about the nature of loss and regret. In rendering these deeply interior feelings into a kind of inescapable, miasmic entity, it gives them a form and depth that no single love story ever could, and explores the ways in which we become consumed not by people, but by our own perceptions of who they were, and what they meant to us; the ways in which we fall in love with our own memories, and choose to hide inside the heartbroken past.

The book I wish I could have written, but know I never could:

When it comes to comparison shopping, I actually have a pretty good (probably inflated) opinion of my own facility. I can read most writers – even true masters – and come away feeling more inspired than intimidated; come away thinking "I could do that, if I set my mind to it." But I have never thought that about Lindsay Lerman. Of all the brilliant, iconoclastic work I’ve encountered since I started exploring small presses and writing reviews some 4-5 years ago, Lerman's What Are You remains the most powerful and breathtakingly original book I've read. Harnessing the language of conviction and confession, she forges entirely new pathways for interpersonal communication and understanding. Her generosity of spirit – the degree to which she welcomes readers inside her mind, and makes of herself an offering – feels downright dangerous, and her reward for standing inside that flame is a work that approaches the sublime. I would love to believe that I’ll write something this good someday, but I doubt I ever will.

The book that makes me want to drink myself into oblivion:

Mmmmm. Back to my youth. A part of my literary education I haven't written much about anywhere is my early and abiding love for whatever you call the subgenre of fucked up, dying relationships (the best I've heard is “antiromance”) and for me that will always begin with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. My parents have always presented as deliriously, almost supernaturally happy. Theirs is unlike any other marriage I've ever encountered – I’ve almost never seen them fight – and as a child of the 90's whose friends' folks were often divorced or well on their way, it could be very comforting to come home from school any given day and find them making out on the couch. But it also made me wonder, for a while somewhat obsessively, what things were like outside their bubble; what love was like “in the real world." The diabolical mind games of George and Martha were my first whiskey-soured taste of the depths to which romantic depravity could sink. Theirs was the intoxicatingly messy drama I’d been looking for, and would chase in one way or another for years to come. I’ve been happily married for almost a decade now, and I rarely drink anymore, but in getting here I learned the hard way that my parents had it right all along.

The book that’s been my refuge from the world’s cruelty:

I've long claimed Notes From Underground as the chief influence on my novel Troll, and it feels like the ideal closer for this exercise as well. No matter where I've been in my creative life – stuck in a rut, slow-and-steady grinding, or cooking with gas – Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man has never been far from my thoughts. As deadly serious as he is wholly ridiculous, he feels like the most necessary form every artist must find and maintain – the willfully outraged maniac who sits alone in the dark, crafting his sad little snowball, plotting and perfecting his piece, hellbent on hucking himself at the world no matter who or what might stand in his way. When I set out to write Troll, I still thought art had that kind of power; the power to change things for the better. I don't know if I really believe that anymore. But if there's a part of me that does, it probably looks like the Underground Man. May he never see the light.