On the Rocks: Benjamin Anastas Talks About \'Too Good to Be True\'
By 2001, Benjamin Anastas was in his early 30s and the author of two well-reviewed novels, “An Underachiever's Diary†and “The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's Disappearance.†His new memoir, “Too Good to Be True,†details everything that went wrong after that, from deep financial troubles to the rupture of his marriage while his wife was pregnant with their son. In his review, Dwight Garner described the book as “so plaintive and raw that most writers (and many readers) will finish it with heart palpitations.†In a recent e-mail interview, Mr. Anastas discussed the taboo of money, his confidence as a writer, what he's tried to learn from Thomas Merton and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:
< div class="q left">Q.
Your distressed marriage, a brief affair you had and the beginning of your ex-wife's relationship with another man (while she was still your wife) are all central parts of the book. Were there any things you thought about leaving out?
A.
Believe it or not, I did leave an awful lot out. You have to be selective with what you tell in memoir, otherwise you'll just be burying the reader in the muck of life. But I did set one rule for myself when I started writing the book: “Don't pretend.†That meant I couldn't shy away from the role that infidelity played in the end of my marriage or the crushing guilt that came along with it. And I had to write about money, which is the last taboo. I remember watching a girl playing a homemade pornographic movie on her Sidekick for some friends over brunch in L.A. and thinking, “There goes the sex taboo.†This was 2004 or 2005. Money has taken sex's place; everyone's relation ship to it is furtive, and no one tells the truth about it.
Q.
The book's epigraph is from F. Scott Fitzgerald's “The Crack-Up,†another very personal work about struggling in life and as a writer. How direct an inspiration was it for you?
A.
I was definitely exposed to too much Fitzgerald at an early age. One of the first things I did when I moved to New York after grad school was visit the Scribner building on 5th Avenue and try to summon the ghosts of Fitzgerald and his legendary editor Maxwell Perkins (to no avail). I have mixed feelings about the “crack-up†essays, to be honest, but there's something so indomitable about Fitzgerald's engine - there he is in Hendersonville, N.C., with his potted meat and soda crackers and the list of suits he'd bought since he left the army. Something in him just couldn't stop spinning off the sentences, and I did take solace in that.
Q.
Were there any other books that influenced the way you approached writing about your own problems?
A.
As I mention in the book, I was reading Thomas Merton's “The Seven Storey Mountain†for the first time. I'm not sure what took me so long to pull Merton down from the shelf, but I found him when I needed him. The idea that he was summoning all of these experiences from before he found God just to cast them off as childish things - I found that very powerful. There was the “old Thomas Merton who had gone around showing off all over two different continents,†as he writes, and the new Thomas Merton who was so much wiser. I tried to let some of that wisdom rub off on me.
Q.
At one point you write, “I had lost the privilege of my self-regard.†How much have your experiences changed your view of yourself and your confidence as a writer?
A.
I real ly was convinced for much too long that rescue was around the corner, that I had written too much - and too well - to wind up lying on a secondhand futon in some apartment share in Bushwick, wailing about all the places where I used to publish. But this is ludicrous. No one is immune to the forces of the marketplace, and I'd done a terrible job of insulating myself from the caprices of big publishing. It was Dante who changed my attitude, actually. I was reading the Inferno, and Virgil says to Dante, “You must journey down another road if you ever hope to leave this wilderness.†That's when I realized that I was doing everything wrong. I would have to start all over again, from the beginning.
Lorena Ros Benjamin AnastasQ.
You're very open in the book about a “mistrust of mental health professionals,†partly because of a bad experience you had with family therapy as a small child. Have you ever learned anything in therapy that's been helpful?
A.
The only thing I've learned in the periods when I've been in therapy is that being in therapy makes me miserable. I'm not cut out for it. It might seem like a strange thing to say for someone who's just written a memoir, but it's other people who I find really fascinating, not myself. The idea of going to an office somewhere to sit on discount furniture and talk about myself for 50 minutes is my idea of hell. I'm bad at it.
Q.
You say you've borrowed money from many people, including “a corporate lawyer whom I met in a bar.†How did that interaction go?
A.
Even a memoirist has to use a little discretion - I can't go into detail about the corporate lawyer who lent me money. But we did meet at the Brooklyn Inn in Boerum Hill. A great bar, crawling with benefactors. No TV.
Q.
What role do you think your parents played in your view of money as you were growing up?
A.
Money was always a source of anxiety in my family and I think I've continued that in a pretty extreme way rather than making my peace with the demands of lucre. My father spent his life rejecting it, which in a way gives money an outsize power, and my mother went about quietly making enough for us to live - but not having enough was always a threat. I remember wandering the aisles of Irwin's toy store in Cambridge, Mass., when I was growing up and thinking, “We can't afford that. We can't afford that. And we can't afford that.â€
Q.
As your son is getting older, have you had more direct conversations with him about money and the situ ation you found yourself in? Does he seem increasingly curious about your practical issues?
A.
My son is about to turn six and he has two piggy banks - one at his mother's house and another in my kitchen. He's definitely aware of when we have money to spend and when we don't, and he prefers that we have it. The other day I gave him a dollar bill for his “school store,†and the first thing he did was make a paper airplane out of it! So I think there is some hope for him.
Q.
At the end of the book, it's unclear whether your girlfriend Eliza is going to stay with you in the face of your financial troubles. Where do things stand with the two of you?
A.
We broke up. It was pretty hard at the time but now it's quite amicable. It wasn't the money that did us in really; it was my inability to wake up from the spell I was under and face reality. As I write in the book I was “mired in an ti-gravity between the present and the past.†It was a kind of sleepwalking.
No comments:
Post a Comment