Scattered Thoughts on Greg's Literary Light

As someone who loves books on a deeply personal level, as well as working in bookstores for a decade and teaching as a reading specialist now, I can say with authority that my father was a major reader. He read novels, plays, history, and writing advice with almost equal fervor. He read every night before bed. He read on the can. He read on set. He read while waiting for other things to happen. He had the most awesome early editions of wonderful books, and the spines were so cracked you knew they weren’t just for show. And I had access to every one of them…..

I am a serious book nerd, as pretty much everyone who knows me knows. Written words are my most important art form, above performance, painting, and photography. While Sharon gets the credit for making me into a capable reader, Greg gets the credit for making books a part of my very soul. I was always welcome to read anything from his collection, as far back as I can remember. I assume he figured that if it was too mature for me, I would give up and put it back. The only author he ever tried to warn me away from was Saul Bellow (he told me to wait a decade, I didn’t, and Herzog bored me into never trying Bellow again). Thanks to Greg’s easygoing attitude, I had read James M. Cain, John Irving, and JD Salinger before I was 14. I read absolutely for pleasure and all of the time. (I just realized that sentence works in both the past and present tense of read)

When I moved to New York, Greg enrolled me in my own personal book-of-the-month club, and every thirty days or so I received a brown paper package in the mail with some new reading material. Sometimes he sent a book of his own that I hadn’t read yet, sometimes it was a brand new book, and sometimes it was a cool edition from a used bookstore. You’d think it would be pretty hard to introduce a bookslave like myself to new authors, but it was because of Greg that I developed a deep fondness for authors like Philip Roth, Maile Meloy, Annie Proulx , and Suzan Lori-Parks, among many others. He ended up sending me about 36 books before I moved back to CA- that’s dedicated parenting for ya!

Some of Greg’s favorite authors that are also mine: Richard Yates, Raymond Carver, Elmore Leonard, James Baldwin, Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy, Albert Camus, Nathaniel West, John Kennedy Toole, Andre Dubus, and the list goes on and on and on. It would be faster for me to mention the authors I love that weren’t influenced by Greg’s taste.

I’ve mentioned this story before, but after one of Greg’s chemo treatments in June 2008, he and Sharon went to Borders and brought home the new hardcover by David Sedaris. I’d mentioned that I had been in the library queue for months and was still #534 or so- for a broke student teacher, Greg tossing the book in my lap with a smile was nothing short of a miracle.

Naturally, all this reading is inextricably tied in to a love of writing, but this has been a long enough entry and I’ll save all that for another time. I’ll close with an inscription from the edition of Writing Down the Bones that Greg gave me and that I came across recently:

MY DEAR MAX,
ONE OF MY TEACHERS ONCE SAID, TAKE GOOD CARE OF YOUR GIFT. YOU ARE GOING TO BE A WONDERFUL TEACHER, BUT DON’T NEGLECT YOUR WRITING GIFT. HAPPY 25TH BIRTHDAY!
MUCH LOVE AND MANY IRISH KISSES,
DADDIO