Drivel: Deliciously Bad Writing by Your Favorite Authors Read online

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  Copyright © 2014 by Litquake

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Drivel : deliciously bad writing by your favorite authors / [edited by] Julia Scott.—First edition.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-698-15264-9

  1. American literature—21st century. 2. American wit and humor. I. Scott, Julia.

  PS536.3.D75 2014 2014013640

  810.8'006—dc23

  First edition: September 2014

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Most Perigee books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, or educational use. Special books, or book excerpts, can also be created to fit specific needs. For details, write: [email protected].

  Version_1

  TERRIBLE CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  PREFACE BY JACK BOULWARE

  INTRODUCTION BY JULIA SCOTT

  1

  TOTALLY PROFESSIONAL

  Guppy Love

  MARY ROACH

  Dear Butthole

  JAMES NESTOR

  Take a Chance on Me

  NEAL POLLACK

  Professor Eatanoff (And His Guidebook of Proper Procedure for Flesheaters)

  DANIEL CLOWES

  Click Here! What I Did for Money

  DAVID MUNRO

  D.A.R.E. to Say “NO” to Marijuana

  MARIE C. BACA

  Trending Now

  CHARLES YU

  Simon’s News Page

  SIMON RICH

  Letter to The Nose

  JOSH MCHUGH

  2

  BAD ROMANCE

  Out of the Mouths of Virgins

  ETHEL ROHAN

  The Affair

  ELLEN SUSSMAN

  Coping

  HEATHER DONAHUE

  Nous

  GLEN DAVID GOLD

  High School Boys

  SUSAN STRAIGHT

  Raspy Romance

  LAURA FRASER

  Letter to Mustache (After Michael Ondaatje)

  MELANIE GIDEON

  Love Poem for a True Hippie

  JANE GANAHL

  3

  ILL-ADVISED CONFESSIONS

  Letter to the Draft Board

  TODD OPPENHEIMER

  Eat What You Kill

  PO BRONSON

  I Dream of Warm Places

  PETER ORNER

  Birth of a Flower

  ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN

  Paul Reiser’s Ghost: A Dream Journal

  ZAHRA NOORBAKHSH

  Hello Kitty Diary

  KATIE CROUCH

  Spanish Diary

  JULIA SCHEERES

  Family Farmacy Poems

  JEFF GREENWALD

  Ten Minutes to Midnight

  JULIA SCOTT

  4

  ODDITIES

  2 Dead Moo: As Sick and Perverted As They Wanna Be

  NATHANIEL RICH

  Dear Mr. Pol Pot

  CHUCK PALAHNIUK

  Juggling Jake

  AMY TAN

  Two Feghoots (After Pynchon)

  A. J. JACOBS

  My Wife Moved to Chile

  CHRIS COLIN

  Dear Mr. Nixon

  CAROLINE PAUL

  The Armoire

  TUPELO HASSMAN

  The Roundabout Story of Captain Torito

  KIERA BUTLER

  Cowboy Up

  ANDREW SEAN GREER

  5

  DARK MATTER

  Woman and Clown

  DAVE EGGERS

  Three Reflections

  RICK MOODY

  Eighth Grade Journal

  ISAAC FITZGERALD

  It’s Dumb

  STEPHEN ELLIOTT

  Art School Emo

  WENDY MACNAUGHTON

  Persephone

  DAMIAN ROGERS

  Among the Barbarians

  ROBERT ANASI

  Do in Remembrance

  JOE LOYA

  6

  TERRIBLE ANGST

  Trouble at Osage Lake High

  GILLIAN FLYNN

  To the Men at Work Outside My Window

  STEVE ALMOND

  Cold Showers and Imaginary Friends

  JOSHUA MOHR

  Tissues

  MATTHEW ZAPRUDER

  Fugitive Fancy

  ANITA AMIRREZVANI

  My Thesis and Me

  DAVID EWING DUNCAN

  Everything

  MAC MCCLELLAND

  Hippies

  JACK BOULWARE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PHOTO CREDITS

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  ABOUT LITQUAKE AND THE SAN FRANCISCO WRITERS’ GROTTO

  Photos taken at Regreturature, the annual live show that inspired this book. © Chris Hardy. From L to R: First row: Ethel Rohan, Caroline Paul, David Duncan, Jeff Greenwald. Second row: Isaac Fitzgerald, Katie Crouch, Stephen Elliott. Third row: Heather Donahue, David Munro, Laura Fraser. Fourth row: Todd Oppenheimer, Jack Boulware, Simon Rich, Mary Roach.

  PREFACE

  The genesis for this project was a desperate idea for a fund-raiser. Janis Cooke Newman and I were brainstorming some type of collaboration between San Francisco’s Litquake literary festival and the Writers’ Grotto collective, which might benefit Litquake.

  Grotto writers reading from their work? “Who’s going to pay to see that?” joked Janis, who of course is a member of the Grotto.

  We continued racking our brains. It couldn’t be just another reading or panel discussion. It needed some real zest. And then it suddenly hit me—what if we had these respected, professional writers read instead from the worst thing they’d ever written? The most shameful, embarrassing, precocious, clunky, sappy, immature, cloyingly earnest prose that somehow may have been stashed in a
long-forgotten box.

  Subconsciously, I think I was remembering a horrifically misguided paper I had written about hippies in the fourth grade. It was so ill-informed and painful that I could still recall some of the sentences verbatim. If I were ever to dig it up, it might amuse a roomful of people clutching cocktails. I would come off looking pretty stupid, but perhaps other writers could be persuaded to also embarrass themselves for a worthy cause. (The “essay” is included here.)

  But would it work? Would writers who ordinarily push themselves to be the best be willing to debase themselves and offer up a personal literary turd in the name of entertainment? This goes against everything writers strive for. It’s hard enough to learn how to write well, to hustle working gigs, to get paid, to get published, to find readers, to make the world care about what you wrote. So why would anyone reverse the process and call attention to the fact their writing once sucked ass? And even more importantly, for our purposes, would they have saved any of it?

  To everyone’s surprise, from Janis and me to the authors, their friends, and the audience, the stage show titled Regreturature has become a hit. We’ve sold out all of our events over the past four years, and now you’re holding this collection—Drivel—which includes several of the pieces we presented, plus many other gems.

  It’s always inspiring to hear great writing read aloud. But listening to a well-established author read from a cringeworthy teenage diary, or an earnest letter to President Nixon, or a groaner student poem is enlightening in a different way. It reminds all of us that writing takes work. That everybody does start somewhere, and often that somewhere is pretty crappy.

  So in a sense, Drivel offers hope for all aspiring writers. And it also sends a warning. If you haven’t thrown away your horrible writing, we may someday hunt you down and force you to share it onstage.

  —Jack Boulware, cofounder of Litquake

  INTRODUCTION

  Right about now, you’re probably feeling pretty good about yourself. You’re holding a collection of shamefully bad writing by authors who have invested a lot of their careers in getting you to think they’re pretty great. If you’ve ever aspired to greatness but were scared of sucking, or spent desperate hours pulling your hair out and throwing draft after draft in the trash, you recognize the cringing terror these authors are feeling right at this very moment. Have a care for them.

  Why? Because there was a time, not so long ago, when their writing stank so badly it wouldn’t even have been used to line a litter box. And yet the contributors in Drivel: Deliciously Bad Writing by Your Favorite Authors are doing the unthinkable: they are willing to impale themselves, in public, for your amusement.

  In fact, the writing in this collection is so bad it deserves its own taxonomy of suckitude. There’s abstruse and esoteric poetry (bad); incoherent and illogical short stories (worse); bumfuzzling proto-journalism (shameful); and pretentious, overwrought journal entries (just turn the page and we’ll not speak of this again).

  And all by your favorite bestselling authors. Yes, they’ve committed horrible crimes against the written word. But the lesson, if there is one, lies in what happened next.

  They never stopped writing. And eventually, they began not to suck.

  I conceived the idea for this book after performing at the second-annual live Regreturature show in San Francisco in 2012. I read from a journal entry I wrote as a twenty-year-old, gushing like a Tiger Beat teenybopper over an encounter with British playwright Tom Stoppard. (“It’s enough to know that I am living IN THE SAME LIFETIME, let alone being in the same room!”)

  Who knew my earnest writerly crush on an eminent septuagenarian would supply so many laugh lines? I was delighted. But as the evening slipped by, I sensed a second feeling in the crowd: a sort of communal catharsis. Together, we’d transcended the pain and the humiliation of dredging up our stinkiest “work.” And we’d turned it into a kind of public sacrifice.

  By far the hardest part of putting this book together was getting authors to cough up their hoary hair balls. Some were seduced by the concept immediately and were forced to choose from a veritable catalog of tumescent masterworks.

  Others not so much. No matter how I framed my plea, begging for some scrap of juvenilia or errant bit of mid-career offal—anything, really, that escaped the wrecking ball of good taste and discretion—a number of fellow writers were not swayed.

  Their excuses were just a notch above “the dog ate my homework”: “My mom threw out my early writing.” “My boxes are buried in the attic.” “I don’t have anything that qualifies as bad enough to share.” (A note on that last one: we don’t believe you.)

  Some writers expressed genuine regret, even as they confessed why they couldn’t contribute. One bestselling novelist got straight to the point:

  “My bad writing is so bad, and there’s so much of it, and so little of the good, that it’s just too painful to lay eyes on that stuff,” he explained. (We understand.)

  You’re about to meet the dozens of contributors who volunteered to pluck their turgid treasures from the bottom of a locked and moldy vault. Thanks to these courageous but foolhardy writers, the world now knows the real meaning of a work in progress.

  —Julia Scott, San Francisco Writers’ Grotto

  MARY ROACH

  GUPPY LOVE

  MARY ROACH is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Stiff, Spook, Bonk, Packing for Mars, and her latest, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. She was guest editor of The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 and a winner of the American Association of Engineering Societies’ Engineering Journalism Award, in a category for which, let’s be honest, she was the sole entrant.

  In my early twenties, I had a job in the public information office of the San Francisco SPCA. I was excited about this job, because for the first time in my limp, spotty almost-career I was being paid to write. One of the things I was occasionally tasked with writing was the “Pet Tips” column in the San Francisco Examiner. There was no byline on this column because there was no columnist. The writer changed from week to week, depending on who had managed to weasel out of it, who had pretended to be under the gun with, say, a press release on Holiday Dangers for Pets (“Deck the halls with caution this Christmas . . .”). I was dismayed by the absence of a byline because I thought I might one day use some of my “Pet Tips” columns as writing samples. Not all of them, mind you. Just the really good ones. And without a byline, how could an editor be sure I hadn’t just clipped someone else’s wry, sparkling guppy piece from the paper and claimed it as my own?

  I seem to recall being proud of the phrase “minute fry” and the sly humor of baby guppies emerging “individually wrapped” in clear membranes. Obviously the word “plastic” to describe the clear membranes is a mistake, the sort of airheaded gaffe that still from time to time shows up in my books. My long-standing inability to wrap things up smoothly (with or without clear plastic) is also in evidence here, in the jarring, graceless shift from oxygen concentrations to “So let’s hear it for guppies!”

  —M.R.

  JAMES NESTOR

  DEAR BUTTHOLE

  JAMES NESTOR has written for Outside magazine, Men’s Journal, Dwell, the New York Times, San Francisco Magazine, Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous other publications. His first nonfiction book, Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves, was published in June 2014. His long-form piece Half-Safe, about the only around-the-world journey by land and sea in the same vehicle ever attempted (and completed), was published by the Atavist in 2013. Nestor owns a 1977 Mercedes that runs on used cooking oil and a 1979 Sebring-Vanguard electric CitiCar, both of which are for sale. He lives in San Francisco.

  The best thing about graduating with a bachelor’s degree in literature from a crappy college in the 1990s is that I never had to worry about getting a real job. There were
n’t any. No employer cared that I could argue the difference between Post-Colonialism and New Historicism, or recite the first four stanzas of Song of Myself, or knew that George Eliot was a woman—nor should they. Employers wanted someone with real-world skills, or, at minimum, someone who had the ability to write and think clearly. Literature courses teach you neither.

  While full-time jobs were elusive, there were plenty of menial, temporary jobs: stuffing mailboxes, data entry, consulting new mothers on diapering products, delivering chicken, estimating the flat paper dimensions of a folded envelope. These were all jobs I held a year after graduating.

  The least degrading of the lot was a two-week gig filling in for a vacationing secretary at a hotel management company. My boss, a red-faced lawyer named Jim (who I later learned got his bachelor’s in sociology), took a liking to me, or took pity on me, or both. After my two weeks were up, Jim kept me on as a junior copywriter. I was eventually hired full-time.

  What does a junior copywriter at a hotel management company do? Not much, I soon discovered. I spent my days nibbling on leftover Entenmann’s coffee cake in the kitchen, reading every line of every New Yorker every week, and grabbing frozen yogurt with the hotel management’s advertising department, who, I found, didn’t work much either.

  I also starting fiddling with this thing called the Internet, where I discovered something called electronic mail. And that’s where this story begins.

  —J.N.

  The Kimpton Group offices were antiquated, even by 1990s standards, and only a select few of us had Internet access on our computers. Lisa, the company art director who sat in the cubicle next to me, had the Internet and she also had email. A few days after I started, she showed me how to use it. When Lisa would go to lunch, I’d hop in her chair, plug in her password, log on, and write to my friends. Soon my friends were writing back. By week’s end, Lisa and I were sharing her Kimpton Group email address.

  A few days later, our shared address received a lewd and crudely written email directed to me. It was from my brother, John. He was organizing a bachelor party and was inquiring as to whether I, or the other fifteen friends on the group email, was going. His note read, simply: