“Being a big fan of Patrick DeWitt, I decided to try and find this one, an early, small press book.
It was somewhat of an ordeal.
Amazon, Worldcat, all the usual sources were completely empty.
So where does one head from there?
Currently (12/2012) this book isn’t even listed on his web site with his other work. I’m not going to spend a lot of time speculating why because I assume the rest of you can do an equally good job.
At the time, though it was listed but unavailable, part of me thought that maybe he wanted to hide it. Didn’t want anyone to know it existed. And regardless of why that might or might not be, part of me wondered whether it was right to go looking for it. What if I’d written a book that I later wanted to unwrite? I guess that’s the curse of writing things down and showing them to other people. When a kid moves from third to fourth grade, there’s a chance that he can start fresh and won’t have to be the kid who cried on the bus home from the potato chip factory. But when the writer cries on the way home from the potato chip factory and then writes a book about it, there’s really no taking it back.
All that said, at the time, I needed a project. I needed something to do. Something that I didn’t know anyone else had done, and something to make me feel like I could make choices for myself. I would get the book, and then I, ME, I would decide whether or not to read it.
It took some doing. Through the old web site, I found a distributor of the book, which no longer listed the book but listed several other items, albums and the like. The distributor didn’t have any copies. THEN I looked on their web site for some of the retail outlets that carried their stuff, boutique shops in Los Angeles. After getting two responses, one completely abhorrent and unnecessarily asshole-ish, the other extremely helpful and friendly, I was told that Patrick DeWitt’s brother had some and would send me one.
Done and done.
It took me almost a year to read it. Like I said, things weren’t going so great. And getting it, that was a win. But once I read it, the win would be over. At least that’s the only reason I can think of for reading about half of it and then putting it down.
It’s a good little book. Half of it is lists and whatnot, which I didn’t really need, but the slightly longer pieces were excellent. This is a guy who can break your heart in 250 words, and the reason I can give for the other strange parts are maybe that to have such a feeling page after page would be too much.
At any rate, since then Dewitt hit big with the Sisters Brothers, an excellent book, and before that he wrote Ablutions, which is one of my favorites of all time. He’s a great writer, and maybe he’s his own harshest critic as well.
As for me…it’s been a year and things are different. And I’m probably still my own harshest critic as well.”