Summing Up

First time in years I did a written résumé meant to be more than a teaser: ********** ABOUT THE AUTHOR   R. F. Laird emerged on the literary scene with the publication of The Boomer Bible in 1991. It has enjoyed a long and controversial history (88,000 copies sold), as has its reclusive creator. At the time of its release, the  880 page  work was announced by The Wall Street Journal as “a sprawling, wickedly funny rewriting of the Bible meant to sum up a generation.” The San Francisco Chronicle hailed it as “One of the oddest, darkest, funniest, smartest and most innovative books to come along in years.” In the same month, the book editor of the New York Times informed the publisher’s publicist that “the Times will never review The Boomer Bible.” And thus began the complicated writing career of the Jersey boy who graduated from Harvard at the age of 19 and got himself banned from American book publishing with his second, even more controversial manuscript, a mock nonficti...

This should be easy. Mostly words. No need to prove anything. That stuff is all in the can already. It’s Thanksgiving Day and I am thankful for everything, the rough as well as the smooth. I am especially thankful that I was enabled to become this old, which provides a perspective not available by any other means. Only late in life is it possible to look back and see patterns in the paths, the equally fruitful roles played by both intention and seeming error, even disaster, in producing a hopefully wiser child than the one who began the journey. I have not finished drawing breath. I haven’t stopped writing. For me that’s part of the breathing process. It’s just that I have become more philosophical, more accepting, of what I can still hope to accomplish with the grand ideas that keep coming but seem to dwell more in the realm of fantasy than reality. Reality is a word that has become quite loaded for me, so I use it here advisedly. I am not expecting big stuff I have in mind to come t...