PETER KALDHEIM
Idiot Wind
Age: Seventy. Residence: Lindenhurst, New York. Book: Idiot Wind (Canongate, August 2019), a memoir of the author’s journey from addiction to recovery while on the road from New York City to Portland, Oregon, and back again. Agent:
David McCormick of McCormick Literary.
Editor: Hannah Knowles.
IF THE recent publication of my memoir, Idiot Wind, has any lesson to offer aspiring writers, it’s this: Never underestimate the power of persistence. As someone who has just made his literary debut at the age of seventy, I’m living proof of that lesson’s value— and of the payoff that is possible if one takes it to heart.
In 1987, desperate to make a fresh start after a decade-long addiction to alcohol and cocaine had wrecked my once-promising career in publishing and left me homeless on the streets of Manhattan, I hit the road like Jack Kerouac and hitchhiked west, hoping to find someplace where I could rebuild from scratch. Eventually, after eighteen days on the road, I landed in Portland, Oregon’s Skid Row district, on the night of my thirty-eighth birthday. I didn’t have a dime in my pocket, but I did have quite a stash of “road notes” that I’d jotted down while I was traveling—short sketches of the people I’d met and the experiences I’d had along the way—and I had a hunch that one day they might provide the raw material for my own version of On the Road.
A month later, after I’d sold enough pints of plasma at the local “stab lab” to rent a room at a flophouse called the Joyce Hotel, I wrote a long letter to my good friend and former publishing colleague Gerry Howard in which I shared some of the sketches I’d collected. He wrote back immediately to say how much he’d enjoyed my road stories, and he urged me to consider expanding them into a book-length memoir. Little did he suspect it would take me twentynine years to follow through on his proposal.
Why the delay? Well, for openers, I waited fifteen years before tackling the project. In the interim I had started and abandoned
drafts of four different novels. But in 2002 I finally decided to try my hand at writing a memoir, and over the next eighteen months I e-mailed six or seven draft chapters to Gerry. Despite his encouraging comments, I grew dissatisfied with my efforts and eventually gave up on the project, blaming my inability to establish a voice and a structure that seemed right for the material. Which was true, but what really doomed that initial draft was a lack of courage. I wasn’t yet ready to honestly confront all the embarrassing behavior I’d been guilty of as a younger man. And that was a deal-breaker.
Lucky for me, my pal Gerry refused to give up, and in September 2015, a few months after I lost my two younger brothers to cancer within a four-day span, he gently suggested that getting back to work on my memoir would help me cope with my grief. Gerry was right. So was J. P. Donleavy when he famously said, “Writing is turning one’s worst moments into money.” When I sat down in November to start writing a new draft from scratch, I was gratified to discover I’d gotten braver in the dozen years since my first attempt. It made all the difference.
Ten months later I had a finished manuscript at last, and thanks to Gerry’s recommendation, David McCormick’s literary agency agreed to represent me. I realize that many an aspiring writer will read this and assume that my friendship with a veteran editor was my “golden ticket” to a publishing contract, but in fact even with a top-notch agent in my corner, Idiot Wind went unsigned for eighteen months before Jamie Byng at Canongate made an offer. Which goes to show that in publishing, there’s rarely an easy path to success. But as I can testify, without persistence there’s no path at all.
My advice to aspiring writers, of whatever age, is to chase your dream with all the stubbornness you can muster—and I hope the day will come when you too have the pleasure of sharing your story.
My advice to aspiring writers, of whatever age, is to chase your dream with all the stubbornness you can muster.