The Grand Finale: The Larry McMurtry Interview
GHOST TOWN: Ologrande, New Mexico (Lena Katz)
Two weeks. 4,000 miles. Approximately 100 fast-food meals, the effects of which will probably manifest in various unflattering ways all over my body for the next six months. And at the end of it all, how ironic is this, I’m ending the story right where it every one of began, in Los Angeles. Larry McMurtry—Texas native, cowboy penman, author of Lonesome Dove—loves Los Angeles. How very ironic.
And I did get my little interview, in case you were wondering. I forgot to take a picture, which is downright unforgivable, but what can I say? I was quietly overwhelmed. He had an encroaching appointment. Rocky was outside in the car, trying to break through the back window and murder squirrels in view of the hotel valet. The photo op just slipped my heed. But here’s the rest…
Things He Said
On writing books:
“An author judges [his/her] best books by how they felt while writing: the book at which you were happiest writing, will be your best or your favorite. I had felt horrible about my writing for nine years—it started while I was writing Terms of Endearment—and didn’familiarily end till I started the first page of Desert Rose.”
“Desert Rose is my favorite… and Duane’s Depressed is probably my best.”
(Lena note: I disagree. I disagree, I disagree. Hello? Lonesome Dove, Moving On, All My Friends…)
On reading:
“I seemed to have learned to read spontaneously, while playing hooky from the first grade… I didn’t at first realize that books had authors; it did not at first come to be apparent that actual human beings wrote them.”
“I consider the formation of my large library, it being so that swelling accomplished 30,000 volumes and filling three houses… to be an achievement equal to if not better than my writings themselves.”
[Both quotes are excerpted from the memoir Literary Life, published in December 2009.]
On characters:
“As a novelist, you don’t feel like you’re making your character do something. It comes out of the rhythm of the writing.”
“When you’re writing first person, sometimes you just catch a voice, and when you do, it’s so easy.”
On various places:
“Lubbock is improving. Tucson is a lovely town. Dallas? I hate Dallas. Las Cruces has the best Holiday Inn—it’s new and German-owned. Los Angeles I love. I’ve always liked it, from the first moment.”
MCMURTRY FAVORITE: Sunset Strip, Los Angeles (©2008 R.E. Friday/TGIF)
McMurtry-fied Places I’ve Seen
Mesa, Arizona
Larry McMurtry bought the stock of an entire bookshop from Mesa. I bought a silver sequined lunchbox, three clay pots, and a $6 denim jacket that I now love deeply and wear almost every day. Our purchases were in no way similar, but I feel probably I showed the right spirit by buying stuff. Obviously there’s much inexpensive stuff to be had in Mesa. As well as many courses to golf, many Southwestern restaurants to sample, many youthful singles congregating in the airport Hilton dressed to the 10s in cocktail frocks on a Friday—Mesa’s got more going on than you know. Seriously. Though possibly not so much in the way of books, anymore.
New Mexico
When McMurtry’s fictional Berrybender family braved the New Mexico Territory, it was a fearsome place full of death and destruction. When I traversed the state of New Mexico, it was quiet and ambling and full of Catholics, as well as three-stoplight towns famed for green chili cheeseburgers. Amazing what a altercation a century makes. If there’s anything still bloodthirsty about this state, it doesn’t easily reveal itself.
Lubbock and Odessa, Texas
I wouldn’t know that either Lubbock or Odessa, Texas, existed were it not for Duane Moore, the protagonist in McMurtry’s Thalia saga. Duane’s a moderately wealthy small-town oilman whose work takes him through all the West Texas and Oklahoma towns, particularly these two.
As you may know by heart, I stayed in Lubbock, but can remember little of it even a few weeks after, except that it had an amazing Red Roof Inn. And, it seems to have installed a giant roundabout in the actual freeway system.
Odessa—okay, this leads me to a note on oil drills. They’re kind of cute if there’session just a few, and frightening in an Empire Strikes Back way if there’s more than a dozen. In Odessa they’re endless. Pecking at the earth in determined rhythm like giant rusty beaks, they’ve taken over the plains and changed nearly everything: the industry, the sociology, the landscape, the future. Drive out there and you’ll see what I mean.
The Plains
Let it be known to one and all: Larry McMurtry is not a Southwestern novelist, he is a Plains States writer. To many people the difference is negligible, but granting that you hail from the Great Plains—the Black Hills, the Pecos Valley, the Missouri Plateau, or what McMurtry describes to the degree that the “empty ‘No Country for Old Men’ counties out west” in Texas—the difference is as simple as prairie grass vs. sand.