Cover

Title Page

Dedication

For my grandmother, Mag

Introduction

The Truth of Thom Jones

• The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.
• Just remember, once you’re over the hill you begin to pick up speed.

—from Thom’s favorite guy: Schopenhauer

THOM JONES’S LIES—his sentences and stories—were more persuasive, more important, and more deeply felt than most men’s truths. “I would work hard to free the truth that’s within me and make it art,” he said in one interview. No lie there.

Thom and I met the night before the 1993 National Book Awards, when all the finalists got to read for five minutes (firm time limit, firm looks) from their nominated books. Thom and I were newly published writers—as we both said, “Yeah, new, not young”—and we clung to each other that night like sibling wallflowers: smart-ass, awkward, and wise enough to be surprised. When people were kind to us (tap or sparkling?), we looked at them like dogs brought home from the pound might, and when Annie Proulx swept by us the next night to claim the National Book Award (“Thank you, I deserved it,” she said), we just pulled our coats and our clunky shoes in a bit more, so as not to get in her way.

But the night before, Thom slayed. He read the first five minutes of “I Want to Live!” from The Pugilist at Rest, a story that would later be selected by John Updike for his Best American Short Stories of the Century anthology. It’s a monologue by an older woman, dying of cancer. She loves her painkillers and cartoons, and there is true love between her and her concerned, hapless son-in-law, checking in on her. I actually saw people in the audience laugh and then cry and then shake their heads at their roller-coaster feelings and at the drama of human beings and our ridiculous, indomitable will to live. Whenever I reread that story, to remind myself how to build character, how to wield voice, I see Thom reading and I see the damp faces before him.