Build a Little Bookshelf in Your Soul

Favorite nonfiction read of 2023, formative novels, why I love Larry McMurtry

Hello!

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Larry McMurtry.

McMurtry was a novelist, bookseller, screenplay writer, and all-around man of letters. He owned used bookstores in Washington D.C. and his hometown, Archer City, Texas. He is probably most widely known as the author of Lonesome Dove. He also wrote novels that were made into well-known movies: Hud, The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment. He co-wrote the screenplay for Ang Lee’s cinematic adaptation of Annie Proulx’s short story, Brokeback Mountain. He died in 2021 at the age of 84.

McMurtry was what you might call a “professional Texan.” Are there professional Pennsylvanians? Rhode Islanders? Utahans? I don’t know, but some people make a career out of explaining my home state to the outside world, and McMurtry was one of the finest examples. (See also, Lawrence Wright.)

By definition, a professional Texan’s stance toward this oversized and unruly state is one of deep ambivalence. I feel that way about Texas, myself. When I was growing up in Austin I never identified as a Texan, but I felt very Texan when I moved away to live in Washington, California, Wisconsin and New York. Reading Tracy Daugherty’s biography of McMurtry (Larry McMurtry: A Life)—one of my favorite books of 2023—I was fascinated to learn that McMurtry wore jeans and boots in D.C., where he lived for many years, but never wore jeans and boots when he was home.

The bookshelf of my soul & Larry McMurtry

There is a short list of books—all novels, all read before I turned 21—that I consider to be foundational to who I am. I think of this list as the bookshelf of my soul. (It’s not an actual bookshelf in my house, though maybe I should put them all together and see what happens.) Here is the list, roughly in order of when I read them:

1. A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

2. The Emily of New Moon series by L.M. Montgomery

3. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume

4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

5. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

6. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

7. A Room with a View by E.M. Forster

8. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

9. All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers by Larry McMurtry

10. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

11. Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Maybe people who know me will be surprised to read this list, maybe not. I have no idea if their imprint on my personality is obvious. What these books have in common is not my passion for them (if enjoyment in reading them were a factor, the list would have to include Francine Pascal’s Sweet Valley High series). I think their common factor has to do with surprise and recognition: in each of these books, I was surprised to recognize something of myself.

Of course, the concept of a “self” in childhood and adolescence is kind of slippery. Who I was when I read these books was in flux. I may have recognized in their pages a character that felt similar to me: a precocious girl with brown hair and greenish eyes (Sara Crew); a questioner of religious identity (Margaret Simon and Holden Caulfield); the daughter of a lawyer (Scout Finch); a writer and flaneur (Henry Miller). But the reason these books are special is not only because they reflected aspects of myself; I was influenced by them, too. I wonder to what extent I shaped my growing identity after these novels, like a plant bending its leaves in the direction of the sun.

My mother gave me All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers when I was around 14 years old. If you are only familiar with McMurtry as a writer of Westerns, this novel might come as a surprise. There are bits about ranching, and the Texas landscape does play a starring role, but the plot unfolds mostly in Houston, Austin, and the Bay Area in the 1960s. The book is about Danny Deck, a young writer with one published novel under his belt. Danny teaches literature at Rice University (as McMurtry did) and sleeps with women. He goes to Austin, sleeps with women, and has a terrifying encounter with a Texas ranger who disapproves of his long hair. He goes to Palo Alto to study writing (as McMurtry did, in the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program with Ken Kesey), his marriage falls apart, and he sleeps with women. He is lonely in San Francisco and makes friends with a “Chinaman’’; he sleeps with women. Eventually, he returns to Texas and destroys the only copy of his second novel. He does not find love or artistic fulfillment. In one of the final scenes, McMurtry seems to place Danny in a state of permanent exile:

“It was always a borderland that I had lived on, it seemed to me, a thin little strip between the country of the normal and the country of the strange. Perhaps my true country was the borderland, anyway.”

Here is a picture of Larry McMurtry in 1968 with his elbow oddly raised and bent over his head. (What is he thinking about? Texas? Books? Women?)

I first read All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers when I was a teenager in Austin in the early ‘90s. Over the years, bits of the novel have resurfaced and come swimming back to greet me at several pivotal moments of my life. The first time I moved away from Texas in 1994, I thought of this passage:

“At dawn we went through El Paso. It was strange, leaving Texas. I had had no plans to leave it, and didn’t know how I felt. I drove on into New Mexico, Sally still asleep. Then I really felt Texas. It was all behind me, north to south, not lying there exactly, but more like looming there over the car, not a state or a stretch of land but some giant, some genie, some god, towering over the road. I really felt it. Its vengeance might fall on me from behind. I had left without asking permission, or earning my freedom. Texas let me go, ominously quiet. It hadn’t gone away. It was there behind me.”

I read about Danny missing the Texas sun on the West Coast, then I moved to the West Coast and missed the same sun. I read about Danny going to Austin “to waste time and eat Mexican food,” then I did the same thing between college and grad school. I read a sad scene in which Danny says, of a woman he loves in San Francisco, that she was the only part of the city that had anything to do with him. I would feel exactly the same about my future husband when I moved to New York for him.

In my forties, I reread All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers. And here’s the thing I realized: when I fell in love with this novel I identified with its introverted, lustful, literary-minded narrator, giving no consideration to the fact that I was a teenage girl not a man in his 30s. (This is true of other novels on my soul’s bookshelf as well.) The Larry McMurtry novel that I considered a primary resource for life features a semi-autobiographical narrator who is beguiled, comforted, and driven crazy by female characters that, upon rereading, never seem quite human but more like sex robots, ice queens, earth mothers, or frigid heiresses. I wonder now—what did I learn from these books? While my eye was on the arc of the male narrator, what lessons was I receiving from the female characters that he encounters along the way?

There are times when I’ve wanted to go back in time and smack those books out of my younger self’s hands. Less Henry Miller, more Anais Nin. Less J.D. Salinger, more Grace Paley. But I’m at peace with my relationship to Larry McMurtry and his alter ego, Danny Deck.

Reading McMurtry’s biography, I got the impression that McMurtry lived a kind of bleak and solitary life, despite his many accomplishments and noteworthy friends. Of all his roles, his stature as a dealer in rare books was the most important thing to him as he got older, and he was saddened by what he perceived as a world that no longer valued books. It was useful for me to read this, as a writer. I have often been intimidated when I hear about writers with rigorous and inflexible writing practices, such as McMurtry’s lifelong habit of writing five pages every morning. (See also, Lauren Groff.) Now, I feel less envious of McMurtry’s religious devotion to writing in the morning and more grateful for the family duties that sometimes distract me from writing. Of course I love it when my family leaves me alone to write. But I am fortunate to have a loving family.

The most surprising thing that I now know about Larry McMurtry is that he had many close friendships with remarkable women. He was BFFs with Susan Sontag! Seriously! Also: Leslie Marmon Silko, Diane Keaton, Cybil Shepherd, Hollywood legend Polly Platt, and other women from Archer City who sound cool enough to hold their own at a dinner party with McMurtry’s Hollywood crowd. Some of these friendships might have veered into romance, but for the most part these were intimate relationships of a platonic variety, dialogues carried out over years in long distance phone calls and letters, some of which Daugherty quotes from in his biography. When I think about how McMurtry’s novel became part of my soul, it makes me feel better knowing that, despite his hang ups, McMurtry was an enthusiastic participant in friendships with intelligent, powerful women.

Other interesting things

• RIP A.S. Byatt. When I was discovering literary scholarship in college, I fell in love with Byatt’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Possession. When I tried to reread Possession later (years after leaving literary academia) I hated it just as passionately as I had once loved it. So that’s something—a book that makes you feel. Byatt is famous for her award-winning novel about two academics in 1980s London solving a mystery about 19th century British poets. I love her four-part series about the life of Frederica Potter, sort of an alter ego for the author. These were the first novels in which I read about a woman going to the gynecologist, giving birth, having children and a career. Here’s Where to Start with A.S. Byatt.

• Kurt Vonnegut’s house is definitely not haunted. “I cannot stress enough that the house of Kurt Vonnegut is now just a completely normal house where people live and is full of completely normal things that appear in completely normal houses. Which to me makes a lot of sense. Vonnegut in my opinion is a charming and scrappy weirdo. He is not the kind of person you think of as living on some kind of grand estate.”

• In this piece in The Walrus, Margaret Atwood reads a story by AI written in the style of Margaret Atwood (please God will someone follow up on her suggestion to ask a chatbot to write a children’s story in the voice of Anais Nin?)

That’s it for now, but let’s start a conversation! Does your bookshelf have a soul? What books are on it? I’d love to hear from you.

Bye for now,

S.