Eight years ago, Scott McClanahan shared an autopsy of his first marriage. Now he’s back with a tribute to a dead friend and his very much alive second wife. The point of view, as ever, is uniquely his own but the two main subjects are both people others know and may have their own opinions on. I will not relay secondhand knowledge since that’s not McClanahan’s way.
Giancarlo DiTrapano was the founder and publisher of Tyrant Books. He once solicited the following blurb from me for a second edition of Atticus Lish’s Life is With People:
“Horrible things happen to people in Atticus Lish’s drawings. Monstrous women lust after Tony Danza; serial killers spout ad copy; one-liners are acted out literally, with disastrous consequences. Yet, I couldn’t keep from turning the school-notebook ruled pages of this book to find out what the guy on the next page was up to.”
He didn’t publish anything I sent him. That was about a decade ago. We didn’t keep in touch.
Juliet Escoria is the author of several books of prose and poetry and the cofounder of Zona Motel. We met once briefly in 2015 when I was the opener on a reading bill with Scott at a bookstore in Chicago. They were on their way from California, home to West Virgina, after getting married. Unlike Gian, Juliet has published a lot of my writing in her magazine.
None of that is in Scott’s book, nor should it be. I mention these things because when I read his book I can’t help but picture his friend and wife my own way. A reader who never met either will have a very different experience than I did but it will be no less rich because Scott addresses his words to each of us directly. He tells us about the people he loves and makes us love them. I knew of some of the events that are featured in his novel but that gave me no inside track or special insight because this is a writer’s story rather a piece of journalism or list of facts.
I don’t know what part of the book strays from lived experience nor do I want to. Nothing in it rings false, so I believe every word. This is what art is supposed to do: to tell the truth by conjured means. I know of few writers that can disappear the distance between reader and writer like McClanahan does. It’s often uncomfortably intimate, like you can feel his hot breath right on your ear as he whispers horrible, funny things.
In many of his other books McClanahan casts himself as an agent of chaos. An out-of-control drunken hillbilly bent on destruction. There are glimpses of that guy here too but many more moments of the shy, self-aware, impossibly well-read and intelligent man I feel honored to know. Some of the events he relates are now decades-old and he’s had time to reflect and process. This is not a blow-by-blow report but a honed and refined account by a writer who’s skill is clear on every page despite (or because of) the simplicity of his prose.
McClanahan withholds many names but his book can be read as a kind of elegy not just for DiTrapano, who was found dead of an overdose in a New York hotel room in 2021, but also the literary moment they were both part of. Towards the end of the book there a few pages devoted to some of the Twitter “battles” DiTrapano and Escoria engaged in—the book is called Fights! for good reason—but this part made me feel grateful to have exited the platform a year or two before. We all know what happened to that company in the years since. There are certainly still lit scene characters who like to stir the pot on Substack, Instagram, and elsewhere, but what little of it I’m aware of feels warmed-over and secondhand.
Now Juliet and I start fighting to celebrate the death of our youth.
What remains vital and immediate is the love between McClanahan and Escoria and the posthumous presence of DiTrapano in their lives. In someone else’s hands this book could have been a litany of score-settling, of boasts and insults. But McClanahan’s aim, I think, is to honor a departed friend and express gratitude for the woman who shares his life.The book arrived in my mailbox late afternoon yesterday and I didn’t put it down till I finished it at 3am this morning.
I wish I was still reading it.