![]() ![]() On day one, I drove an hour to a bookstore in Bellingham, Washington, the first of a three-city tour. When the money came through-$1,500-plans were set in motion. I applied for a grant that would pay my way down the Pacific Coast. I wanted to meet readers and show the publisher how much it meant to me. Scratch an author and you’ll find tales of woe, bookstore readings with an audience of one. The welfare kid in me sucked on those words like hard candy.Īuthor tours are rare these days, and with good reason. It wasn’t a lot of money but it was solid and it was New York. As the book jacket says: This is the story of a man with a hole in his head, a woman with a hole in her heart and a priest with a hole in his vows. I recently wrote something different, far removed from my thinly veiled parents, a story about faith in the grip of crisis. If I could make it there, I could make it anywhere. But not one was published outside of Canada. Woven through them was all I’d grown up with, the larceny and fury, the boldness and fear. No more dirty-faced welfare kid, no more trash. Receiver to my ear, I slumped against the glass of the booth and stared at the ocean. I was in a phone booth in Bodega, California calling home for messages. When I got the offer from a publisher, my legs went soft. She sputtered, flummoxed, “You think you’re just going to write a book and someone’s going to publish it?”Īristocrats wrote novels. I started writing a novel and told my mother. They’d made me, but did that make me them? Was I genetically doomed? My parents were at the heart of everything I wrote. In my 20s, I wrote poetry and stories, much of it raw, ripped from my own headlines. In and out of foster care, I left home at sixteen.įor the first half of my life, that world, those people were my secret. She did what she could to keep the wolf from the door. I lied for Irene, but she was hard to contain. I found out that night what they called a kid like me: Bastard. ![]() At a slumber party I listened to the other little girls talk about their parents’ weddings, the white dresses, and churches. I found out quick what they called welfare people: White trash.Īlthough Irene took Willie’s last name, my parents never married. ![]() Eventually she got up and went down to the welfare office. When Willie was arrested, Irene stayed in bed for weeks, drunk or sleeping it off. Why should she be the only working stiff in the family? So, she quit teaching and took up drinking. My mother, Irene, had been a schoolteacher when she took up with him, but soon found herself resentful. They shipped him off to a federal penitentiary. I was three years old when they caught up with Willie. For the first few years of my life, we lived under an assumed name. I didn’t go to college, have no degree, but I do have what they call, “a past.” I was named after my father, Willie, a con artist, card sharp, and sometimes garden-variety thief. It seems unlikely yet inevitable that I should have become one. ![]()
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