Either Write Things Worth Reading, Or...

My friend Alan Huffman once asked why I hadn’t considered writing a book. I told him I didn’t know enough words.

“Use some of them twice,” he said.

That approach must work for Alan, who has since written several books, including the latest, “Sultana.”

But the problem for me with nonfiction is that I’m far too lazy to do the kind of research required, even on a subject close to my heart. (Besides, does the world need another book on the refreshing qualities of beer?)

I tried fiction once, with a short story. And I quickly learned that it isn’t enough just to come up with a title. There have to be characters, and they have to say and do stuff. As if I had the imagination for that.

Which leaves available the memoir, a popular field I’ve never fully understood. Is it that these writers all have much better memories than I do, or simply that they’ve led lives filled with experiences much more tragic, comic or inspiring than mine? Or, as with Frank McCourt, both?

I’m not saying my years have been entirely without highlights, but near-starvation and a ne’er-do-well drunk of a father in Depression-era Ireland are not among them. And I’m not sure there is a market for my tale of angst about having to dance at the Farmer’s Ball in high school, or of hydrophobic trepidation at my full-immersion baptism.

Of course, James Frey and “Margaret B. Jones”, among others, have demonstrated that adherence to truth is not necessarily a requirement to get a memoir published. But I suspect that if I tried to mention my rewarding two years of Peace Corps service in Africa, or my daring rescue of 12 first graders trapped in a burning bus, someone in the know would quickly rat me out.

So I remain unpublished, at least in the book world. But if I should ever muster the gumption to try to tell my life story, I at least have constructed the opening line:

“About the time my face cleared up, my hair started falling out.”