Literary Sycophant

A few years ago, I was visiting a friend of mine in Rome. We were in the middle of a conversation when his phone rang. He glanced at his Caller ID.

“Mark Strand,” he said. “The machine will get it.”

I was dumbfounded. “Mark Strand?!” I repeated, almost as shocked as if it had been Tom Cruise or Oprah Winfrey on the line.

“Oh, he calls all the time,” said my friend. “I'll talk to him tomorrow. You were saying?”

Um...what was I saying?

“It is the moment to resist the onset / Of another average day, to beat the daylight / For exotic instances of this or that...”

No, wait, that's the beginning of a poem by Mark Strand. As in, The Guy Who Used to Be the Poet Laureate of the United States of America. Right up there with Rita Dove and Billy Collins. Like, wow.

It's kind of embarrassing to admit this, but I have groupie tendencies. Whenever I read something really good, I want to know all about the person who wrote it. Those “About the Author” blurbs were written with me in mind – except that they never dish as big a scoop as I want. Obsessively combing through the authorial thank-yous sometimes helps, especially when I recognize a name among the writer's acquaintance, but it's not as good as getting some really juicy gossip. Why oh why don't the supermarket tabloids ever feature scandals among the literati (and their hangers-on)? Oh, I suppose I could always hide in the author's shrubbery, high-powered binoculars in hand....

Star-struck name-dropper that I am, I get a real thrill out of being able to say that I know a few moderately famous writers – or, in some cases, knew them, before their tragic and untimely deaths.

For years, I had a crush on David Foster Wallace – which is why I recognized him the instant he appeared in Mary Karr's latest memoir. In her AA group, she meets a red-bandanna'ed genius who soon begins sending her yards-long missives, each meticulously footnoted. Karr coyly refers to him only as “David” throughout, but there's no one else it could be.

Never mind that David Foster Wallace was, in my sister's words, “a complete mess.”

Never mind that he was engaged, and I was married, and we lived in different cities.

Also never mind that I never so much as clapped eyes on the man at a book signing. I was still besotted. Not quite besotted enough to actually finish Infinite Jest, but I made it halfway through, and that's saying something.