Hating Olivia: A Love Story (28 page)
I used to ask myself: What was all that insanity about? Why did I have to travel so far for nothing? Why does the thought of her, as I work over the keyboard on an autumn evening, leave me so empty, so curiously vacant?
Why do I not care if she’s alive or dead?
Long ago I gave up searching for answers. Now … I don’t ask anymore.
Lorrie Foster, my lovely wife, who was there when nothing was happening except for my nonstop work. The work is still going on, and she’s still there.
Dan Fante, who threw the doors open, and without whom this book would probably not be in your hands. You know everything you did. Thanks, pal.
Jack SaFranko, for being there.
John SaFranko, for inspiration and guitars.
Uwe Stender, agent extraordinaire. At the risk of increasing his volume of queries, this is the guy a writer really wants—he takes your call, and stays on the line.
Steve Hussy, Richard White, and Eric Vieljeux for taking the chance on me in far-flung places like England and France.
Tony O’Neill, for writing the review that put
Hating Olivia
on the map and for generously taking the book with him wherever he went.
Amy Baker and Amy Vreeland for their support and painstaking work, Carrie Kania, Gregory Henry, and everybody else at Harper Perennial.
Mary Dearborn, for writing endorsements whenever I asked, even if they led to nothing.
James Bacon, Kent Swanson, Mike Ferraro, James Ward, and Chris Byck for always listening to me yak.
Joe Ridgwell, Zsolt Alapi, Sal Difalco, and Ujjwal Dey for all the great ink.
Zosh (RIP) and Pete.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, all the people who tried to stop me along the way. You were messing with the wrong dude.
The Favor
God Bless America
Hopler’s Statement
Loners
Lounge Lizard
P.S. Ideas, interviews & More … *
On Writing, Discipline, and Perseverance
M
ARK
S
A
F
RANKO
started writing at a young age. His novels
Hating Olivia
(2005, Murder Slim Press, United Kingdom),
Lounge Lizard
(2007), and story collection
Loners
(2008) have garnered rave reviews and become cult favorites in Europe. In 2009,
Hating Olivia
(under its French title,
Putain D’Olivia)
was published in France by 13e Note Editions and was selected by Virgin France as one of its Favorite Summer Reads. It was followed by
Lounge Lizard (Confessions D’Un Loser)
in 2010. His short stories have appeared in dozens of magazines and journals internationally, including the renowned
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
In 2005 he won the Frank O’Connor Award from
descant
literary journal for his short fiction. He was cited in Best American Mystery Stories 2000 and has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is also a playwright, and his plays have been seen in many New York venues as well as in theaters in both Londonderry, Northern Ireland, and Cork, Ireland. In 1992 his one-act play,
The Bitch-Goddess,
was selected Best Play of the Village Gate One-Act Festival in New York. As an actor he has appeared both onstage and in several independent films as well as commercials. A songwriter and composer, his music is available through iTunes and many other online stores. If there is any time left in his day, he paints.
In his more mundane working life, SaFranko has held a multitude of jobs: political risk analyst, dating advice column ghostwriter, freight loader, teacher, landscaper’s assistant, deliveryman, truck driver, clothes salesman, astrologer, short order cook, fast-food worker, bank clerk, proofreader, bar musician, government pensions clerk, brewery worker, reporter, telephone solicitor, stock clerk, and chauffeur, among others. His goal in life is to avoid further mundane work.
On Writing, Discipline, and Perseverance
T
RYING TO EXPLAIN
where a book—in this case,
Hating Olivia
—comes from, is like trying to explain the mystery of a life. You can’t do it because it’s too complicated. But I’ll try anyway.
From the beginning, all I wanted to do was create. What drove the urge is beside the point now, and the explanation for that, too, is complex. But coming from where I did—a working-class environment where earning the daily bread was the only important thing—I didn’t have a clue where to start. Being an artist was something that other people did. How they did it, I didn’t know.
One day I pulled a book called
Henry Miller On Writing
off a shelf in a Trenton, New Jersey, bookstore and the world was transformed. The author’s straits were similar to mine. He desperately wanted an artistic life but didn’t understand how to do it, yet he figured it out by trial and error. And he was there to tell the rest of us that it could be done. I damned near underlined every sentence of that book. And I was on my way.
But before I got to where I wanted to go, there were many, many stops along the way, mostly in the form of an endless number of jobs—bank clerk, deliveryman, reporter, and landscaper’s assistant, to name a very few. I started writing, and all the while, no matter where I was and what my circumstances, I took notes and wrote. Novel after novel, song after song, story after story, play after play. It was a bona fide apprenticeship, with the writers I admired serving as mentors since I wasn’t going the MFA route. And as Miller himself said (and I’m paraphrasing), “a writer must put down thousands of words before first signing his name.”
Everything else—women, jobs, and, in many cases, at least in the beginning, my own well-being—took second place to my calling. It was my impression, and it hasn’t changed much over the years, that the artist—the genuine article—cannot serve any god other than Art. Sure, you might have to work many a crummy gig to keep a roof over your head and food on the table, but even if you have to get up at three in the
morning to get your real work in, then that’s what you have to do. And it also means practicing your discipline every single day, day in and day out, year after year, no matter what.
“From the beginning, all I wanted to do was create.”
Of course it’s not always so easy. Life keeps butting in, sometimes more noisily and brutally than others. When that happens, even the thought of writing can be more than you can handle. Hell, you might not even be capable of getting out of bed. Nevertheless, you have to find a way.
That’s the kind of period
Hating Olivia
covers. I was living with a woman who was beautiful but who really had her issues, as we say nowadays. (And, lest I present myself as blameless, so did I.) Every day was an adventure—and not a lighthearted one. There was sex, and fights, and lots of odd jobs, including, when things got really dicey, delivering newspapers and manning the night desk at a motel, among several others. There was deceit and treachery, booze and drugs. There were cops and shrinks and bill collectors. There were uncounted cigarettes and pawn shops and nightmares. There were many sleepless nights.
Through it all I somehow managed to bang out a couple of novels and a stack of songs. Don’t ask how. I still don’t know myself. Blame it on my youth.
With my first—and very bad—novel, I managed to land an agent. It was a miracle, the dumb luck of the neophyte, and after the agent cut me loose when he couldn’t sell the book, I wouldn’t be able to get another for damned near three decades. But that fortuitous event convinced me that I had something going for me, and so I kept on keeping on, come hell or high water, and there was lots of both hell and high water over the years. Years that would again and again test my resolve to make an artist of myself.
I always knew that the raw material of that stretch of time would be turned into a novel. About ten years afterward I tried to write it, but gave up after twenty-five pages. I was either still too close to the events or the voice wasn’t right—probably both. A few years later I tried again. Still no go.
Fifteen years after the fact, I was sitting in my tenth-floor apartment in Hoboken looking at the lights of Canal Street across the river when I thought I’d take one last stab at the novel idea that by now was beginning to feel a bit like an albatross around my neck. By this time much had changed. I was married and a father. I’d had an on-and-off career as a journalist, I’d published scores of stories in journals, a couple of micropress novels, and my plays had been produced in theaters all over New York City. But something more important had changed—I’d finally acquired the requisite psychic distance from my earlier experiences. What had been painfully charged whenever I tried to deal with it in the past no longer was. What had happened way back then was just a series of ludicrous events now. And I no longer felt like I had to try to shoehorn into my book every second of my experience. I could merely lay down what happened and the reader could do the rest.
The character of Max Zajack had already been born, in an earlier, unpublished novel called
God Bless America.
By this time I had no illusions that getting Max into print would be easy. In fact, as soon as I put the finishing touches on
Hating Olivia,
I felt it would have virtually no chance of publication in America. The
problem? The American appetite for books has not yet caught up with a certain type of literature: self-referential, “confessional,” dark. And my countrymen especially don’t like novels about struggling writers. It’s part of the explanation for why writers from Patricia Highsmith and Jim Thompson to Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski always fared better in Europe than in the United States. To steer the book into print, if I wasn’t going to try to publish it myself, I’d have to think out of the box for a change.
Nevertheless, I did contact a handful of American publishers with
Hating Olivia.
Just as I suspected, nobody was interested.
I retreated quickly to the idea of trying something I’d never tried before in order to get the book noticed. But what? Maybe I could solicit an endorsement from someone whose work was in the same ballpark as mine and, more important, who was still alive.
I was on my way home from somewhere—probably my job at an ad agency in Soho—when I stopped into the now-incinerated Border’s bookstore at the World Trade Center. As usual, I perused some favorite names in the stacks: Miller, Bukowski, Dostoyevsky, Céline, among others. That day I spotted a new name: Dan Fante. Who the hell was he? I knew John Fante, of course, but had never heard of this guy. The title of the book was
Chump Change.
I opened it, read the first couple of lines, and bought it.
When I was through reading, I decided to write its author and introduce myself. It wasn’t like me to ask for help, but I was at the end of my rope.
Much to my surprise, I heard back from him within a few days. “Send the manuscript out,” he offered generously. “I’ve got some time on my hands. I’ll read it and let you know what I think.”
I mailed off the book and waited. I quickly got a blurb back that went something like this: “Put down your Grisham and Stephen King.
Hating Olivia
is the real deal. An addiction of the heart. I read it in one day. I recommend it one hundred percent.”
Before I had the chance to repackage
Hating Olivia
and expose it again to the American publishing machine, Dan had an idea. Why not try his British publishers? He himself wasn’t well known here, but he had a growing readership in Europe.
“Going European"—where my work might well find a more receptive audience—was always in the back of my mind. Through Dan I made the acquaintance of a small British house, Murder Slim Press, who at the time was only printing magazines. They offered to bring out
Hating Olivia
as their first novel. It was a flattering offer and I took it.
It was damned near ten years from the writing of
Hating Olivia
to its publication in England. The excellent reviews for the novel injected my writing career with a life it had never had before. It acquired a reputation. Then it began to travel all over the world. One day an email appeared in my box asking for permission to publish
Hating Olivia
in French.
Thousands of copies were printed in France, and thousands were sold. The book was selected by Virgin France as one of its Favorite Summer Reads of 2009. I got an all-expenses paid trip to Paris to read for booksellers and attend the Book Expo. All this for a novel that had been virtually shunned in the United States. I felt enveloped in a strange dream.
“Hopefully the torturous route to a worldwide audience for
Hating Olivia
will inspire another struggling writer on the road.”
Other books have followed
Hating Olivia
in both the United Kingdom and France. In many ways, my European successes have justified my many years of work in obscurity. I might not be satisfied—I’ve written much more than has seen the light of day—but I can’t say I’m not fulfilled as an author. And now, five years after the appearance of
Hating Olivia
in England and its long and twisted journey into print, Harper Perennial is bringing the book out in my native country.