Volume 4, Issue 60: Bob Gibson

"He's a snarling, intimidating presence on the mound."

Pre-order The Time Has Come, my novel that comes out May 16. I think you will like it. All pre-orders with proof of purchase enter the contest we unveiled last month. Hi.

My dad is the oldest of four brothers, which means, in a family that had a total of eight children, he was a little bit like a second dad to all of them. Thus, having had him as an actual dad, I’ve always been able to bond with my uncles about how it feels to have my dad mad at us—how it feels to disappoint him.

Specifically: My father has this unique vocal inflection when he says the words “Jesus Christ” and the words “God Dammit.” Whenever I get together with my uncles, I do this impression of my Dad, born from years of experience. They’ll gather around, and I’ll start huffing and puffing, and I’ll nail it. “Jeeeeeeezussss CaahRIST … Gawd DAMN it!” They crack up every time. “That’s exactly how he says it!” my uncle Jimmy will say, howling. “You always knew you were in trouble with him when you got the CaahRIST.”

It is funny now, 35 years later, to be able to do a pitch-perfect impression of what your dad sounds like when he is mad at you. After all, it worked out fine. You turned out fine, your dad turned out fine, your uncles turned out fine, everybody’s all right. My father is one of my best friends, the guy I want to watch every Cardinals and Illini game with, a guy I take trips with multiple times a year while we still can, a guy I wrote a whole book about. My uncles adore him too, and still look up to him to this day.

But when you’re 11 years old, and your dad is mad at you, and he is yelling at you, and you don’t know how to make him stop, there is nothing funny about it at all. It is the scariest thing in the world.

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Yesterday morning, both my kids were late getting ready for school. My older son William does the morning announcements at his school—the elementary school he only has two months left at before the perils of middle school—so I have a hard deadline to get these children inside the school at 7:20 every Friday morning. And everyone was scrambling. Brush your teeth, make your bed, comb your hair, get your school papers together, all the madness of a Friday morning after a long, exhausting week—every parent has been there.

We were finally on our way out the door when my younger son Wynn realized he couldn’t find his Percy Jackson book. Wynn is the reader of my children; he has already finished all the Harry Potter books, he has successfully transitioned his entire class from graphic novels to chapter books, he’s even a pretty funny writer himself. When he is in the middle of a book, he is obsessive about it, at the expense of everything else in the outside world. And he was absolutely losing his mind looking for the book, the way an eight-year-old does when the world is not working out the way it is supposed to, particularly when he knows it’s his fault (he’s the one who lost the book, after all) but does not want to admit it.

“I am not going to school without that book!” he shouted, stomping around the kitchen, now too angry to actually look for the book he lost. “I’m not!”

It was now 7:15—I had five minutes to get them to school, and he didn’t even have his shoes on yet. Any father will tell you that a disturbing large percentage of the job of father is simply getting everybody in the damn car, and we were running out of time. Also, and this context is probably important, I was tired. I’d been traveling like crazy over the last few weeks, I’d been up late watching basketball and writing the night before, I had a ton of work I need to finish once I dropped them off, and I was groggy and spent, and also the world sometimes feels like it’s coming apart at the seams and that feeling is always bubbling right underneath the surface of all of us, all the time. Context.

I told Wynn that he needed to let the book go, that we didn’t have time for him to look for it, that he could find it when he got home from school, that we had to leave. He ignored me and continued to stomp around. I said it again; “Wynn, it’s time to go.” He ignored me again and clomp-clomped into the other room. “Wynn,” I said, louder this time. Again: Ignored.

I thought about what my father would have done, had I ignored multiple direct orders like that. I thought about what his father would have done.

And I lost it.

I tore off toward him, grabbed his arm, spun him around and yelled—roared—“God DAMN it, Wynn! Get your goddamned shoes on and get in the fucking car. Now!”

This is what I did. I am generally an affable sort. I would love to tell you I did something different. But I didn’t. That’s what I did.

Wynn looked up at me, no longer rampaging about his book, no longer defiant. He was merely an eight-year-old boy, looking up at a 47-year-old man, a man who is his father, a man who he emulates and loves and fears and admires and growls about with his friends and surely sometimes dreams of dreams of really letting Dad have it, if only he could. His upper lip quivered. His eyes watered slightly. He was scared. This beautiful boy, this center of my universe—he was scared of me. I had scared him.

He zipped up his backpack, put on his shoes and headed wordlessly out to the car. I drove him and his brother to school in silence, dropped them off and then spent the rest of the day feeling like shit.

When I picked Wynn up after school, I gave him a hug and told him I was sorry about that morning. He said it was fine, he was fine. He hugged me back, happily. He was in a good mood, it had been a fun day at school, he hadn’t thought about it, he just wanted me to tell him how his bracket was doing. But I know it lodged in his brain somewhere, because I know when my dad yelled at me, it lodged in my brain somewhere, just like it did when his dad yelled at him, and on and on and on it goes. I know my son loves me, and I know my son knows I love him, just like I know I love my dad and I know my dad knows I love him. But I also know that, to this day, I will occasionally have dreams where I am 10 years old and my dad is yelling at me and I stand up to him in a way that I never did, in a way I never could have, back then. I will have this dreams the rest of my life, and so will Wynn, and so will William, and I wonder if someday their kids will too.

******************

There is much talk these days of the erosion of the American Dream, the fundamental (and probably apocryphal) idea that life is supposed to be better for your children than it was for you, and how that should forever be paid forward throughout each generation. My parents, and their parents, believed in this, and inarguably achieved it: I was the first Leitch boy to go to college, something I was only able to do because of my parents’ sacrifices and decades of hard work, and their parents’ before then. But I do think focusing solely on economic situations misses the point of the American Dream construct. The goal isn’t for your kids to be richer than you were; the goal is for them to have a richer life than you did. I hope we are doing this for our children. They are growing up able to see and do things I never did. They have friends from all different economic and demographic backgrounds. They are being taught sociopolitical concepts that were never introduced to me. They have been able to go places I couldn’t go, to listen to music and watch movies that I never had access to, to express themselves in a way that I never felt free to. This is progress, I think. This is what I hope for them.

And part of that, too, is each generation of parent getting better too. When I look back at my family’s history, I see my father learning from what he saw as his father’s shortcomings and trying to do better, just like his father surely did, and his father. Each generation is a little more open, a little more understanding, a little less withholding. I cannot imagine what my great-grandfather would have done if my grandfather had told him when he was a teenager that he wanted to write for a living, but my father not only accepted that decision, he supported it in every way he could, even when it must have felt, at many times, like his son had made a terrible mistake. That’s progress. I’m so fortunate to have the father I’ve had.

But we still carry our parents with us, forever. When Dad yelled “Jeeeeeeezussss CaahRIST … Gawd DAMN it!” when I dropped the tools when we were working on the car, or I ran over one of his bushes with the lawn mower, or I painted the deck fence the wrong color, he was channeling his father, and his father, and his father, all the frustration, all the mores of the time, all the weird intricacies and hangups of fatherhood and manhood, all the ways you try to make your kids tough while making sure they remain kind. He’s also a human being himself, tired, impatient, doing his best but also never going to get it perfect. And when I close my eyes at night sometimes, I don’t always see the kind father who has had my back since the day I was born. I see the irritated, disappointed father who lost his patience. I see the man yelling at me. And I feel scared. Not of him—not today, not anymore. I know it was just frustration, I know there was no violence, I know he was trying to figure it out like everybody else, I know how good he is. But I still remember my fear.

Someday my sons will be older, and they will think of their father. I hope they will know that I am good, that I was doing my best, that I love them as much as anyone has ever loved anything. I believe they will. But I also know that they will get together when I am not around, and they will make fun of the way I say, “Jeeeeeeezussss CaahRIST … Gawd DAMN it!” when I am upset, or I am in the car behind a terrible driver, or I have just lost my patience. They will laugh at the recognition. But I also wonder if they will remember mornings like yesterday morning, when the dad they loved, the dad they look up to, scared them.

And they will notice the same thing in themselves. They’ll notice they say, “Jeeeeeeezussss CaahRIST … Gawd DAMN it!” when they’re in traffic too. Then they, like their father before them, like their grandfather before them, like so many before all of them, will feel bad, will feel like they’re getting it all wrong, will fear that they’re messing it all up. I hope they’ll give themselves a break. They won’t get it perfect. But they’ll get it better. And that’s all that counts. You do your best. You screw up. But you try not to screw it up as badly tomorrow. You try to make it better.

Oh, and Wynn found his book. It was right where I’d told him it was.

EIGHT WEEKS TO BOOK LAUNCH

Every week here at The Will Leitch Newsletter, we countdown the weeks until the release of The Time Has Come, my novel that comes out May 16. This is the spot for weekly news, updates and pre-order reminders.

Blurbs! From what I understand, blurbs don’t make nearly as much of a difference as most writers believe they do—with the possible exception of someone like Stephen King—but they still take up a lot of psychological attic space: Blurbers are, after all, your peers, as well as the earliest people to read the book. I’m told that blurbs are a little less important for your follow-up novel than they are to your first one, which makes sense; it’s less vital, the second time out of the gate, to find well-known writers to establish your bonafides when you’ve already shown you can do this at least once.

Nevertheless, you do need them for the book jacket, particularly when people love the books they’ve written and you’d like those same people to read yours. The Time Has Come is my sixth book, and each of them have had blurbs … including some that look awfully eccentric years later.

The blurbers so far:

Life As A Loser: Tom Perrotta, Ken Kurson.
Catch: John Green, James Frey, Ned Vizzini.
God Save the Fan: Sally Jenkins, Jeff MacGregor, Robert Kurson, Jeff Pearlman.
Are We Winning?: Chuck Klosterman.
How Lucky: Stephen King, Richard Russo, Kevin Wilson, Carl Hiaasen, Chris Bohjalian.

The hardcover version of The Time Has Come, which comes out in less than two months now, will have two blurbs.

The first comes from Kevin Wilson, author of Nothing to See Here and Now Is Not the Time to Panic.

Will Leitch has written another compelling and propulsive novel that I could not put down. What makes him such an amazing writer is his keen eye for what makes us human, all the seemingly invisible threads that connect us and those shocking moments when we’re pulled together and forced to reckon with the world. Leitch is as empathetic a writer as they come, and I trust him to guide me through any danger, any story, and know I’ll come out of it with something special.

The second, and most recent, comes from longtime editor, recent massive bestseller and longtime friend Jenny Jackson, who wrote the outstanding (and currently flying-off-the-shelves) Pineapple Street. You may have seen Jenny on “Good Morning America” last week, which chose Pineapple Street for its “GMA Book Club.”

Jenny’s book is a crackling good read, and you should buy it. I am honored to have Jenny’s blurb on The Time Has Come jacket.

With kindness, empathy, and the generosity of spirit that is the hallmark of his work, Will Leitch takes seven very different characters and brings them vividly to life, skillfully weaving their fates in a story that is taut, surprising, and ultimately speaks to the character of America itself.

So! Blurbs! The book has them! If you like those books, maybe you’ll like mine! Buy it, you fools!

Also, while I have you, the Southern Voices Book Festival posted my talk at their event from a couple of weeks ago. If you want to watch me wing a speech for 45 minutes, here’s your chance.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. Oscar Winners, Ranked and Updated, Vulture. Updated with Everything Everywhere All at Once.

2. The Shocking Shame of Alabama Basketball, New York. I cannot believe that Brandon Miller is playing basketball right now.

3. DC Movies Updated, Vulture. Updated with Shazam! Fury of the Gods.

4. Sports Movies, Ranked and Updated, Vulture. We updated our rankings for Champions, even though Champions did not actually make our list.

5. I Did a Writeup of the Aaron Rodgers “News,” New York. Man, I’m sick of that guy.

6. Your March Ranking of Presidential Candidates, Medium. My monthly update. Keep an eye on Tim Scott?

7. In Praise of the Bracket, Medium. You can solve all the world’s dilemmas with a bracket.

8. Your WBC Weekend Preview, MLB.com. Now only slightly outdated with last night’s game.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we recapped the Oscars and discussed “Scream VI” and “Champions.”

Seeing Red, Bernie and I are back to weekly shows, it’s baseball season, people.

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, no show this week.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“The Best Picture Winner Is As Traditional As They Come,” Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times. Justin Chang is one of the best film critics in the world: Honest, fair, and madly in love with the movies. This is maybe the perfect piece about Everything Everywhere All at Once.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Sick of Myself,” Matthew Sweet. I’m going to a show at the 40 Watt here in Athens this week, and every time I go there, I remember the Matthew Sweet show I saw here a few years ago. (And wrote about here.) These songs are still so good.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

Stupid Illini. Time for this guy to take over the planet.

Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will