Larry McMurtry at the Dollar Store

Managed to cardboard and woodchip one little path.

Which I know doesn't sound very impressive.

But hey! It was 80° by 10am with a dew point of 70. Very humid. Very uncomfortable.

Doing any kind of garden work on days like this involves arriving there at 8am—which I gotta say, I do not like at all. I like to putter in the morning. Drink two cups of coffee. Catch up on emails and texts. Skim the news (uniformly awful). Read my pals' online journals—though it appears I'm one of only a few who writes with any degree of regularity anymore. Long-form writing really only appeals to Boomers and GenXers. I am the priestess of a dead religeon.

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Work in Progress is progressing—but slowly.

Flavia is an architect, so I'm having to do deep dives into architect jargon.

In the chapter I'm writing now, Flavia does a project with the resident genius, starts sleeping with him, falls in love with him—he does not fall in love with her—reveals her dirty little secret to him (I'm rich!!!), gets used by him for her money, develops a cocaine habit.

None of this stuff happened to me, so writing it is... challenging.

Of course, all fiction writing is autobiographical to some degree—like method acting. The event you're describing in a fictional character's life may not have happened to you, but you draw on your own feelings to evoke the characters' emotional reactions. So, you know. It can get intense.

I have no idea if it's any good or not.

I started it; I'll finish it. That's all I know.

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Rereading Tracy Dougherty's excellent biography of Larry McMurtry because I have run out of books! (I have also run out of streaming media to watch; absolutely nothing appeals.)

McMurtry is one of my favorite writers, and the fact that his ouevre contains so many out-and-out stinkers and clunkers is actually part of his appeal. The Last Picture Show is a perfect novel! So, how do you explain Cadillac Jack?

McMurtry lived a really extraordinary life. On his own terms (which could best be described as "episodic"). He made his own rules—up to the point where his own body felled him. In 1991, he had a heart attack and then quadruple-bypass surgery, and though he lived another 30 years, in a very real sense, his life ended in 1991.

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One thing medical gatekeepers don't really tell you is that around 30% of all people who undergo bypass surgery experience significant personality changes.

Larry McMurtry was one of those people.

In his memoir, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, McMurtry wrote:

...The violently intrusive nature of that operation – of any operation, really – was bound to dislocate one for a bit, I thought. Car metaphors seem to apply. I had had some serious engine work done and then been jump-started back into drivability. If there was a little sputtering at first, well, that was only to be expected.

In the fourth month matters worsened – the sense of grief for the lost self was profound. I didn’t feel like my old self at all, and had no idea where the old self had gone. But I did know that it, he, me was gone, and that I missed him. I soon came to feel that my self had been left behind, across a border or a canyon. Where exactly was I? The only real sign of the old self was that I could still connect with my grandson, Curtis McMurtry. Otherwise, I felt spectral – the personality that had been mine for fifty-five years was simply no longer there – or if there, it was fragmented, it was dust particles swirling around, only occasionally and briefly cohering. I mourned its loss but soon concluded that gone is gone – I was never really going to recover that sense of wholeness, of the integrity of the self.

That being the case, I began to put a kind of alternative self together, and the alternative self soon acquired a few domestic skills, on the order of loading the dishwasher or taking out the trash. But I still couldn’t read. I was at the time owner of perhaps two hundred thousand books and yet I couldn’t read.

The problem, I eventually realized, was that reading is a form of looking outward, beyond the self, and that, for a long time, I couldn’t do – the protest from inside was too powerful. My inability to externalize seemed to be organ based, as if the organs to which violence had been done were protesting so much that I couldn’t attend to anything else. I soon ceased to suppose that I would ever reassemble the whole of my former self, but I could collect enough chunks and pieces to get me by – as I have.

Such surgery, so noncommonsensical, so contradictory to the normal rules of survival, is truly Faustian. You get to live, perhaps as long as you want to, only not as yourself – never as yourself.