About Me
Former professor & magazine editor. I collect records, drink rye & absinthe, go to shows, do the Guardian cryptic, play rugby, yell at people from my office window. Used to double and stand-in for B. Murray, clean toilets, build pitchers' mounds, drive a Zamboni, wear a sandwich board, etc. I have a wife, two beautiful daughters, another daughter, and a beloved record collection.
Books I've Written
Khawla's Wall - A love triangle set in Dubai. An examination of the social, economic and psychological metamorphosis of the city.
Ash Drive - A fictionalized memoir about growing up in 1970s suburbia Equal parts The Wonder Years, Are You There, God? It’s Me Margaret and various childhood issues I’ve been hashing out with my analyst for the past 30 years. It’s a coming-of-age story about Daniel McCready. We meet him in 1976. He’s growing up in the Washington, DC suburbs with a stern Army Colonel for a father and a sardonic, saintly mother who helps out at church when she’s not smoking, drinking coffee, reading, doing the Washington Post crossword or, octopus-like, all of the above. Daniel is sensitive, frightened, confused and bookish.
Each chapter represents a year in Daniel’s life, culminating on his first day of high school in 1983. Ash Drive focuses on how mysterious and inexplicable the world is to a child, and how, in many senses, we never grow out of this. Daniel wrestles with Catholicism, nuns (figuratively), friends (literally), family, sin and especially girls (figuratively, despite his efforts to make it literal). He falls in love with a new girl every year. It’s a love that will last forever, until he forgets all about her over the summer. The pain, fear and awkwardness of romance are terribly real, though, even if Daniel’s affections are fickle. I try to let the reader enter the boy’s consciousness very directly, to see and feel the world the way he does. Ash Drive is, in one sense, a clinical examination of a particular time and place—late-70s/early-80s suburban Virginia—and of a specific family and person. There’s an attempt to observe subjective things with a great deal of objectivity. Which is not to say the novel is stuffy or cold. On the contrary, it’s touching, elegiac, poignant, funny and folds into a small camping chair.
Favorite Authors
Bukowski, Dostoevski, Bulgakov, Larkin, Li Po, J. Baumbach, Basho, Greene, D. Mitchell, Amis, Donny D, Ed Dodd, Pelecanos, Tartt, Rufus (the setter), Paul Westerberg, Jandek
