Exciting—soon, I’ll receive my finished book; I’ll
hold it in my hand!
The
Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever
Told will be on bookstore shelves in June, but I get it
first. Yay!
The last time I was
this excited to hold a new book of mine was many, many years ago, when my
second novel, Paradise, was about to
come off the press. I was a young man
then and believed that Paradise would
be for me what The Sun Also Rises was
for Hemingway.
Of course, Hemingway was
dead when Paradise came out. I regretted not meeting him through my poet father. Though Dad had encountered Hemingway at
literary events, he told me he would not have crossed the road to shake his
hand. Dad considered the man a popinjay.
Nevertheless, Dad understood
my regret, so he took me over to meet Hadley Hemingway, the man’s Paris wife. An afternoon spent with her satisfied my desire
to be cloaked—however lightly—in the robe of the Lost Generation.
The last time I was
this excited to hold a new book of mine, therefore, was when I believed I was writing
as a literary competitor, partly, because I was young, as a competitor to my dad,
partly, because I was young, as a competitor to that other of my literary heroes.
This time, now, it is
different. I am older—a lot older. I have achieved some successes of my own outside
of the literary world. I am a husband of
nearly forty years (though I am still a “work in progress,” being drafted ever
more finely—with careful re-writes—to glorify the Lord); I am the father of
four; I was for many years a productive, relationship-based salesman in the
marketplace of the law.
My memoir project began
on Dad’s 100th birthday, when I watched him accept the
congratulations of scores of admirers, and when I realized that my wife’s and
my grandchildren—not yet born—would not understand the full context of their great-grandfather’s
centenary event unless I wrote down the funny stories and the poignant stories and
the redemptive stories for them to read later.
So I did.
Those of you who write
know that writing is a difficult process of trying, ever more precisely, to get
the work done correctly. This applies to
fiction, to non-fiction, to memoir, to any serious word-smithing endeavor.
While placing words on paper,
the work takes on its own life. It
generates its own requirement of correctness, which supersedes the correctness
that the writer had understood at the beginning as the level of correctness toward
which to strive. That initial level of correctness
was a standard only of the writer’s. That
level had not yet attained the higher and tighter level required by the words
themselves.
The
Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever
Told
contains funny and poignant stories of my growing up in a literary family. Our droppers-in were probably famous but their
fame meant nothing to me since they were just people verbally glittering around
Dad and Mom.
As for the redemptive
story, my tale becomes more complicated when I sought to find a standing place
of my own—read the book.
***
Of course, everyone
should buy and read my book. Of course,
not everyone will do so.
But if you are one who does
buy my book, you will discover in my book just where all of these events were leading,
and you will discover why I was moved by the greatest story ever told.
Meanwhile, soon, I will
have my book in my hand.
I’ll hold onto it for
you, until you can get your own copy, in June.
Copyright, Dikkon Eberhart, 2015
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