I just recently added a new title to my author's page and I thought I might say a few words about it. This new book THE IMMACULATE TRYST OF GRANDPA KINGFISH was the first novel I ever wrote. (I began it when I was nineteen). I wrote it off and on over a course of several years, finishing it more that a decade ago. It was my first foray into long form, my first try at what Mailer calls "a marriage". It is based on a screenplay I wrote that won some awards and then found itself mired in development purgatory. But there was something in the themes, in the duel trajectories of the main characters, in its the frank and sometimes fumbling preoccupation with sex and commerce and consequent reconciliation with ideas about friendship and finding one's place that stayed with me. Borges describes the baroque as a "style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities." And I think this book would qualify for that definition. I put all I had at the time into it. I didn't curb. I didn't judge. I just let the muses sing and for all its shiny bits and flubs I find it still compelling.
To write well you have to read even better. And I was coming out from under a fairly profound and varied tutelage ripe with admonitions of fearlessness and truth and how nothing must be forbidden as a subject for the artist. And that gloss is there, the sheen of the good student working to find himself, working to please. But a first anything I think should be allowed its first intention, its first blush. Like tattoos or travel stickers, we sometimes need stigmas of where we have been. If only to acknowledge fully where we are going.