Why I Wrote a Book Nobody Asked For
The payoff that has nothing to do with money, praise, or fame
Someone asked me recently what the payoff was for a reader who buys my memoir, Thumb Out. It was a fair question. I thought about it seriously and gave a serious answer.
But the more honest answer is the one I gave after that.
The payoff that matters most from this book has already been collected. I collected it in the writing. Everything else — sales, reviews, readers, whatever praise or indifference the world decides to offer — is gravy.
I want to explain what I mean, because I think it matters to anyone who has ever considered writing something true about their own life and talked themselves out of it.
Writing Thumb Out was a deep dive into understanding my life. Not performing my life for an audience. Not crafting a narrative designed to make a reader like me or feel comfortable with me or come away with a tidy lesson. Just looking at the thing honestly and writing down what I saw.
What I saw was not always flattering. I was a young man of considerable privilege who took a very long time to do anything with it. I drifted. I chased a film career across three thousand miles and six years and learned, finally, that what I was chasing was hollow. I lost a guitar to a theft I partly enabled. I walked away from things I should have said something about. I spent years in rooms that were wrong for me, doing work that had nothing to do with who I was, and called it searching.
Writing all of that down — not to excuse it, not to dramatize it, but simply to see it clearly — was worth more than I can calculate. Not because confession is therapeutic, though maybe it is. Because understanding your own life is one of the rarest things a person can do, and most people never do it at all.
The book cost me something to write. There are scenes in it that required me to implicate myself, to resist the comfortable version of events, to let the people I loved be complicated rather than heroic or villainous. That is hard work. It is also the only work that produces anything true.
I am not going to pretend I have no interest in whether people read it. I do. I think it is a good book. I think the readers who find it will get something real from it — permission, maybe, to look at their own drifting years without shame, or recognition of the particular pain of a father who could have shown up and didn’t. Those are not small things to offer a stranger.
But I refused to write the book a market might have asked for. I am who I am. I cannot twist myself into a pretzel chasing acceptance. The book that gets written in pursuit of approval is never as good as the book that gets written in pursuit of truth, and I have read enough of both to know the difference from the inside.
So here is what I will tell you about Thumb Out.
It is the first volume of a memoir called The Spaces Between. It covers my years before the road, on the road hitchhiking across America in 1973, and the decade that followed — New York, California, Hollywood, and finally the return east that ended with a paintbrush in my hand and a golden retriever named Brer riding shotgun in my Datsun. It is written in a voice I have spent fifty years developing and did not compromise to make anyone comfortable.
The payoff for you, if you read it, is something I cannot fully promise in advance. That is the nature of honest books. They give you what they give you, and it is different for every reader.
What I can promise is that I did not hold anything back.