B005HF54UE EBOK (16 page)

I guess more than anything I try to be a writer. I got into a band because I wanted to be a part of music, to be around people who liked music, but I’m not much of a natural musician. Not like the guys in my band. I just wanted to write songs. I had a hard time in school and my ability with the English language was average at best, so I never thought about writing novels. I think all my English teachers would have rolled over laughing if I told them I wanted to try. So I joined a band, ’cause everyone can be in a band. And being in a band got me writing story-songs and the story-songs gave me the guts to write fiction. I wish I could say I could do more. I can’t dance and I don’t know or care to know anything about acting. I don’t think I’ve ever even met an actor. But I wish more than anything I could draw like Nate Beaty, the illustrator for
The Motel Life
. He’s a genius. If I could do that then I could write graphic novels. That would be something. I’m a huge fan of graphic novels, but I think a fan is where I’ll probably end up staying. I can’t draw at all.

What has been your hardest scene to write?

A lot of
Northline
was difficult for me to write. Jimmy Bodie took a lot out of me. I tried my best to show all sides of him. Both good and bad. I think at his root he’s decent. He’s just lost his way. He was a hard character for me. But the hardest scenes were when I was rough on Allison Johnson. Writing the scene with the busboys made me cry, and the scene with the guys who take her to their house made my heart sick. I cut that scene over and over, but the thing is it’s true. When your self-worth and confidence are gone, it’s easy falling into bad self-destructive situations. I hate that scene because she let it happen and I didn’t want her to let it happen. I really like Allison Johnson. I want her to be all right, but if I was to be true to her character I had to let her get beat up by the decisions she made. If you make decisions out of weakness, a lot of the time you pay the price.

Name your favorite bookshop.

Sundance Bookstore in Reno, Nevada, is probably my favorite. They’re the nicest people around. Another great one is called Green Apple in San Francisco, and you can’t beat Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi. Man that’s a great book town! And you can’t forget Powell’s in Portland. That place is like a mall of books. That’s one of the lucky things about traveling—you can find great bookstores.

What is on your desk right now (e.g., photos, books, dictionaries, and bills)?

I have a dictionary and a few CDs. I have a picture of Shane MacGowan and a picture of Carole Lombard. I have a couple quotes from William Kennedy there, too. He’s one of my biggest writing heroes. And yeah I have a few bills and a half dozen Post-it notes to remind me not to forget certain things or fuck up other things, and I have a copy of
The Ring
magazine. I think some of the writing in the magazine is really great. I read it when I get burned out. My desk ain’t much, but if you blew up my house the desk would probably make it out unscathed.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

About the Book

“She Fell into Me One Night and I Began Writing Her Story . . .”

F
OR YEARS
I worked at the main branch of a trucking company. Then they moved me to a warehouse in a different part of town to load our company’s freight into trailers. This warehouse was the size of four football fields. When I got there the best thing about it was that there were two women working there and they were my age, in their mid-twenties. I’d never worked around women, and most of the time in my daily life I never saw any, except in restaurants and stores. So it was great just to see a girl during the day, to see her working. To see her walking by. I can’t tell you enough how nice that was.

One of the girls was quiet and plain-looking, but there was something about her. She had black hair and blue eyes. She dressed in jeans and a flannel coat and a ski cap. It was cold in the warehouse. Everyone dressed the same. After a while I found out she was dating a man who worked there, and it turns out he was a skinhead, a sort of neo-Nazi. I didn’t know anything about him or that way of life. I didn’t know if she was a part of it or not. She didn’t seem that way, she just seemed sort of beat up.

After a while I began to get a crush on her. I used to feel guilty about it. What if she was skinhead? What if she really felt that way? But really I couldn’t stop thinking about her, and the truth is I never found out either way because I never had the guts to talk to her. I just created a life in my mind with her and me in it. And there were no neo-Nazis or warehouses in that world, just her liking me and me liking her.

Later on I met a rockabilly kid who worked at a different warehouse. I began drinking with him and his rockabilly friends after work.

They all drove old classic cars and greased their hair back and smoked unfiltered cigarettes and drank whiskey. It was like they were from a different time. Also, they liked music, they liked seeing bands, they liked punk rock. So I fell in with them for a while hoping maybe they’d be more open-minded to things. But slowly they loosened up around me and started saying things about Mexicans and African-Americans and Asians. It seemed to be a part of their whole language together, so I quit hanging out with them.

At the same time I had a couple childhood friends who were construction workers, and slowly over the years they were getting more and more angry and worried. They knew contractors who were hiring illegal immigrants and paying them low wages. Because of it the contractors could undercut bids, and they began to get more jobs. My friends were having a harder time getting big contracts. Most of the immigrants were from Mexico and soon parts of Reno were becoming Mexican. Store fronts began to have Mexican names and the restaurants in the area suddenly became Mexican restaurants. Reno was changing, the western U.S. was changing. My friends were changing, too. Subtly they were becoming more and more racist. So finally I quit hanging out with them as well.

I’ve spent my whole life trying not to be around people like that, but for a while it seemed like that world was chasing me. The hippy bar I liked to go to became a skinhead bar for a time. A friend of mine was stabbed by a skinhead, and for a while the only girl I ever saw went out with a neo-Nazi. And me, I was just trying to find my own place amongst all that. Like the characters Allison Johnson and Dan Mahony, I was looking for a place that wasn’t so rough. But, like them, I just wasn’t quite strong enough to get there on my own.

There is a price to be paid for being weak.

At the time, the people around me said if you went north you’d find a cheaper, easier place to live. A place where you could afford to buy a house. A place that didn’t have crime or people who looked different or thought different. They were talking about Alaska and Montana and Idaho. I guess, really, I was looking for my north, too. I was looking for a place where no one would give me a hard time for living the way I wanted, for liking stories and movies and books and music, and for liking people who were a little off, who had a hard time getting by.

Allison Johnson and
Northline
came from that era. She fell into me one night and I began writing her story. It’s a story I’d thought about for a long time. For a while I didn’t know if she’d make it, ’cause I wasn’t sure I’d make it. But the key to the story and the key to her is that she doesn’t give up. For as weak and beaten down as she is, she has the ability to keep moving forward. At the time I needed someone in my life who wouldn’t quit, who no matter what would get up in the morning and try. So I invented Allison Johnson and
Northline
and wrote it out and revised it and wrote it out again and again. And when I was finally finished I was on my feet and away from that world and, luckily, so was she.

Read On

The
Northline
Soundtrack

N
ORTHLINE BECAME A HARD NOVEL
for me to write because I began to really like Allison Johnson. I began worrying about her. Every time I put her in a rough spot or let her make a bad decision or made her pay for that decision it wrecked my head. I’d be dark as hell. So I started taking breaks from it and playing guitar, and the songs I came up with were always sad and slow, and they were instrumental. After a time I realized they were about
Northline
, too. I couldn’t stop thinking about the story even when I was playing guitar.

I wrote instrumental after instrumental and a lot of them seemed to work together, so I talked with Paul Brainard, the steel player from Richmond Fontaine, and told him I wanted to make an instrumental soundtrack to the novel. I asked him if he would help me with it, and luckily he said yes. He didn’t even give me a hard time about it. He never said, “Does an instrumental soundtrack to a book really make any sense?” (I don’t know.) “Has the publisher asked you to do this?” (No.) “Have they said they’ll take it?” (No.) “Are they going to pay for it?” (No.) He just read the manuscript and decided then to buy into the idea, and together we tried our hardest to create music that would fit the feel of the novel.

We recorded it in the basement studio of the house he was living in. We sat down there for hour after hour, and we’d say things like “That note right there feels like Dan Mahony, don’t you think?” or “The way I see it, Paul Newman’s riding in on a horse. He’s dressed like a Mexican bandit. He’s got on a sombrero and he shoots three guys then grabs Allison Johnson to rescue her. He throws her on the back of his horse and they get away. Do you really think the mix feels like that?” Answer: “Maybe if we lower the harmonica some.”

It was fun, and I was lucky to have time to get to make a record like this with someone as talented as Paul. He’s always been my favorite steel player, and I’ve always wanted to make a record that shows off how great he really is. I hope we have. We were also helped by the guys in Richmond Fontaine (Sean Oldham, Dave Harding, and Dan Eccles) and by our friends Chet Lyster, Dave Lipkens, Dan Davis, and JJ Golden.

I guess in the end my hope is that the music reflects the feel of the book, the heart of the book, and that after you’ve finished the novel you’ll listen to the music and once in a while think about Allison Johnson and TJ Watson, Penny Pearson and Dan Mahony, Evelyn and Jimmy Bodie. Maybe the music will help the novel stay alive a bit longer.

Have You Read? More by Willy Vlautin

THE MOTEL LIFE

With “echoes of
Of Mice and Men
” (
Bookseller
, UK),
The Motel Life
explores the frustrations and failed dreams of two Nevada brothers— on the run after a hit-and-run accident— who, forgotten by society, and short on luck and hope, desperately cling to the edge of modern life.

“A hugely compassionate, wildly original road movie of a novel.”

—Esquire
(London)

“Despite the bleak story . . . Vlautin . . . transmits a quiet sense of resilience and hopefulness.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A sweet and aching story . . . which has drawn comparison’s to the work of Vlautin’s hero Raymond Carver. His prose is steeled with a disconcertingly pure honesty.”

—The Irish Times
(Ireland)

Praise for The Motel Life and Willy Vlautin

“An unapologetic ode to self-defeat. . . . Its charm is unassuming. . . . At times its appeal is irresistible. . . . It’s a cliché to compare a novel to a story overheard in a bar, but
The Motel Life
insists on the comparison. Willy Vlautin is the singer-songwriter for Richmond Fontaine, a band based in Portland, Oregon. The music he makes is very much like his writing: mournful, understated, and proudly steeped in menthol smoke and bourbon. Slighter than Carver, less puerile than Bukowski, Vlautin nevertheless manages to lay claim to the same bleary-eyed territory, and surprisingly—perhaps even unintentionally—to make it new.”

—
New York Times Book Review
(Editor’s Choice)

“The lead singer for Oregon-based Richmond Fontaine delivers a debut road-trip novel that echoes the spare, bleak style of such writers as Denis Johnson and Raymond Carver. . . . The author conveys the pain and desolate lives of his characters without a hint of melodrama. . . . Anyone who enjoys the story will wish that it went on longer.”

—Washington Post

“At any given time there is, somewhere in American fiction, a man sitting in a bar, stone broke, drinking whiskey and beer, and wondering whether to turn up for work or just high-tail out of town. He’s there in Bukowski, in Denis Johnson, and in newcomers like Matthew McIntosh. He’s there, too, in this debut novel by Willy Vlautin. . . . Vlautin is clearly reaching back past Bukowski and the others to the granddaddy of all tragic road stories, that of Lenny and George in
Of Mice and Men
. Jerry, with a missing leg after an accident jumping a freight train, is dependent on Frank for guidance and reassurance. Frank makes up bedtime stories to soothe his brother to sleep, whether holed up in a snowbound Montana field or another dingy motel room. The stories, with their childish mix of sex, adventure, and optimism, stand in for Lenny and George’s longed-for farm, with its famous rabbits. . . . It’s enough to give a sense of hope to this serene and assured piece of minor-key Americana.”

—The Independent
(London)

“The novel
The Motel Life
is being passed around among Reno readers hand-to-hand with fervent testimonials and solemn assurances of its worth. That is how it came to me, and that is probably how I will pass it along.
The Motel Life
has racked up a lot of praise since its release, but that’s not really the point when it comes to a homegrown masterpiece like this. With a satisfyingly difficult to bear narrative realism, the book matters because it is good—really good. It also might be the most honest piece of literature ever written about our city. I sat reading with dry, but red-rimmed eyes, wrapped in a bundle in the corner of my couch, feeling both irritable and spellbound as I turned the pages.”

—Reno News & Review

“The same lost, struggling souls who inhabit Willy Vlautin’s songs in the band Richmond Fontaine find themselves turning up in his critically acclaimed novel
The Motel Life
. Fans of Richmond Fontaine’s somber alt-country rock will find the book to be a fleshed-out version of the themes Vlautin has written about for years—isolation, downward spirals, and finding a small bit of temporary grace in an unforgiving world.”

—Rocky Mountain News

“Full of tenderness, truth, and life. I haven’t read a novel this good in a long, long time.”

—Guillermo Arriaga, Academy Award–nominated screenwriter of
Babel
, and author of
21 Grams
and
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

“A beautifully artless first novel. . . . Eschewing compound sentences and even similes, Vlautin illuminates the lives of two decent young men from Reno who have been dealt a very bad hand. . . . It’s not only as ineffably sad as a lyric by Willie Nelson but it’s also a richly compassionate and sweetly sad meditation on what Billy Clyde Puckett in Dan Jenkins’s
Semi-Tough
(1972) called ‘life its own self.’ If there’s any justice, anywhere,
The Motel Life
will be widely read and widely admired.”

—Booklist

“Like all the best bits of Denis Johnson and Raymond Carver worked up into something new and strange and funny.”

—
Nude
magazine

“Sometimes I like to pretend Willy Vlautin invented me. Maybe that sounds weird. If you’ve ever heard his local country-punk band, Richmond Fontaine, you know the people Vlautin writes about tend to be pretty messed up. They’re always broken down or lost or just flat-out at the end of their rope, whereas I’ve been a pretty lucky girl so far. But the reason I like to think he made me up is that if he did, then no matter what, no matter how many times I keep making the same mistakes, he would never give up on me. He’d hold out hope; he’s like that. . . . Frank and Jerry Lee are lost souls, but they’re good guys, and Vlautin keeps trying to help them out. He gives them a dog, he gives them a couple of chances, and he even gives them a Willie Nelson tape. ‘I felt so bad for those guys,’ Vlautin says. ‘They needed Willie Nelson. I wanted them to have that kind of comfort, and to know that . . . that they liked beautiful things, that they weren’t bad guys at all.’”

—
Willamette Week

“A plaintive ballad about bad luck and good people, in the tradition of John Steinbeck. With lovely line drawings by Nate Beaty, thick paper and a retro font, this covetable book is a bibliophile’s dream.”

—
The Daily Telegraph
(London)

“Both heartbreaking and inspirational . . . written . . . with a simple hypnotic tone that seems as if it was grown in the Reno heat.”

—Associated Press’s asap

“A hugely compassionate, wildly original road movie of a novel about two brothers, Frank and Jerry, who are trying to escape the ramifications of a fatal hit-and-run accident. The warmhearted, folksy balladeer proves he’s just as much at home on the printed page as he is behind a mic, with detailed yet understated drawings complementing the tale.”

—
Esquire
(London)

“Willy Vlautin’s
Motel Life
. . . echoes
Of Mice and Men
. The story of two brothers, it is set in a contemporary world of American highways, cheap diners, and rundown lodging houses. The odds are stacked against the two, but the sadness of it all is mitigated by the resonance of the prose and a feeling I can only describe as ‘this is as it really is.’”

—
The Bookseller
(London)

“A
very
fine novel. Writers of this quality—courageous, powerful, and wonderfully compassionate—are rare, and need to be treasured.”

—John Burnside, author of
The Dumbhouse

“A tale of bad luck, heartbreak and resolute hope. Set in small-town Middle America, it follows two brothers hitting the road to escape the consequences of a hit-and-run accident. Vlautin writes in an engaging and deadpan style, seducing the reader into the narrative until you, like the brothers, can find no escape.”

—
The Guardian
(London)

“Vlautin recently published his first novel,
The Motel Life
, whose desperate characters bounce from bar to bar, from flophouse to flophouse, [and] also populate many of his songs. According to Vlautin, writing about characters in various dire straits comes naturally, and the Reno native said often he creates fictional characters for songs and stories to help him get through personal strife. ‘I guess the working-class kind of characters are what I feel most comfortable with and understand, and frankly I’m most interested in working-class stories,’ Vlautin said. ‘Those are my favorite stories to read. It’s the stuff that gives me the most comfort. That’s what I like so much about guys like [author John] Steinbeck. They always wrote the same kinds of people. They wrote tons of different stories in different areas, but the heart of his people were always the same, and that’s something I aspire to.’”

—
Salt Lake Tribune

“
The Motel Life
is sparsely written but utterly compelling. . . . Bad luck, bad decisions, and heartbreak haunt every tight sentence here, but there is ultimately hope in Vlautin’s writing, a light at the end of the tunnel, which compels his characters forward.”

—Doug Johnstone,
The List

“Just finished Willy Vlautin’s first novel
The Motel Life
, and I’m floored. . . . The story is set during a fridgid winter in Reno, Nevada, sometime around now, though there’s a sense that the wayward, rootless characters in
The Motel Life
could come from any place, any time. . . . Anybody who’s ever done a lot of hard-core traveling—I’m talking hitch-hiking and Greyhound, not airlines or cruise ships—knows of the other side of the American dream. The freeway drifters, the rest-stop campers, and folks on the run from something or to somewhere—the kinds of people you see and make up stories about because you have to place them somehow, to make them less ghostly, more real—these are the people that inhabit this book. . . . And despite it all, there’s hope here, too, in human endurance, in the need for resolution. As Vlautin writes with prose that’s simple but not simplistic, immediately engaging and no-frills, that hope becomes the underlying pulse of the story. It’s what makes this book feel so damn real, so powerful, so much like life, even if it’s not yours.”

—Jonathan Zwickel,
The Stranger
’s “Line Out”

“A sweet and aching story . . . which has drawn comparisons in style and voice to the work of Vlautin’s hero, Raymond Carver. His prose is steeled with a disconcertingly pure honesty [but] the reader cannot but grow to like and worry for the brothers.”

—The Irish Times
(Ireland)

“The work of a careful and conscientious writer. . . .Vlautin, like his musical equivalents Tom Waits and Shane MacGowan, manages to render pathos without sentimentality in prose whose tone is downbeat, fatalistic and hangdog.”

—
Hot Press
(Ireland)

“Willy Vlautin, frontman for Portland’s Richmond Fontaine, has turned three years as a touring musician and ten years working for a trucking company into a literary device. . . . The dead-enders populating Vlautin’s imagination don’t move forward so much as they indent the gravel with the deep ruts of their insecurities. . . . Whether in song or in print, the furthest Vlautin’s men can move is in circles, shackled to their dysfunctions and their meager paychecks. . . . It’s an almost cruel pastime, wanting Vlautin to crush more small-town souls for our entertainment. But the way his men wrestle with their inner turmoil is a reminder that no matter how many miles you clock on I-5, on 101, or around the corner, the same demons still stare you down through the rearview mirror.”

—
San Francisco Weekly