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By Brendan O’Meara
Become a Patron!Harrison Scott Key (@harrisonscottkey) has written three memoirs, and what’s key to them as the narrator is making yourself either the idiot or the villain. In How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told (Avid Reader Press) he was, for a time, the victim of his wife’s affair. But in deftly maneuvering and playing with structure he treats his marriage like a crime novel.
Harrison saves some of the biggest punches for himself as and his wife pieced together the wreckage into something lasting.
Harrison is also the author of The World’s Largest Man and Congratulations, Who Are You Again? He’s masterfully funny and handles the balance between jokes and earnestness with a skill few possess.
In this episode (his third trip to the pod), he talks about how writing a memoir is like reviewing the security footage of an event, how this book was a LOT, the cost of writing a super personal memoir, the character of you, structure and shaping, and how this book was like writing a true crime novel where the murder victim was his marriage. Great stuff.
Parting Shot: Business cards! Galleys!
Galleys are here, and it’s wild.
This week has been insane. Spending nearly $1,500 on photos, $650 on one, yeah, ONE fucking photo, but we desperately needed an Olympics photo. I’m going through the proofreader’s queries, drawing up all the captions for the photos, laying out a prospective design for photos, getting my head around the messaging of the book, met with one of the organizers for the Pre Classic here in Eugene. It’s a lot.
Got great business cards with pre-order QR code on the back.
Like, the hustle is starting, but it’s not your average hustle. It’s way more … one on one. Like, I’m texting and emailing single people, not blasting it out (though I kind of am). Is it laborious, tedious? Sure, but I like going door to door selling knives or vacuums instead of passively putting up a billboard that 99% of people are just going to drive on by.
The galleys are wild.
I haven’t held one of my own books in hand in like 14 years. I think my publisher wants to forget that I’ve written a book before because on the inside there is no mention of Six Weeks in Saratoga. 14 years between published books. What the hell was I doing from 2011 to 2025?
It’s amazing how the time slips on by. At 31 years old, I was a jealous, bitter dude, working at a running shoe store while trying to still be a writer and a sports writer writing long features for SB Nation Longform when Glenn Stout was heading it up, or ESPN the Magazine, or Grantland1, trying to make a living on something that wasn’t in retail, college educated, MFA, working in … retail2. All my peers were publishing widely and wildly, so it would seem. Few people knew how social media was warping our expectations of what a writing career looked like.
Since 2011 I worked in landscaping, stacking produce at Whole Foods, working in a wine cellar, working at a bookstore (not as romantic as it sounds), all while trying to flounder my way through this morass. All advice is futile.
I tried following the worn paths of generations gone by and it led to a bitterness and frustration that I can barely describe. The only advice is to pursue something so long as you love it because honestly it’s love of doing, say, the podcast, or narrative that fuels you while you take on that day job, or that contract job you don’t tweet about. Or, maybe you’re lucky like me and after doing this for 20 fucking years, you finally get a break. Maybe this parlays into another book. That’s my goal. That’s been my vision, if you want to call it that.
I can’t begin to express the luck it took to get here and being able to stay on the playing field. There’s a reason both my books have been dedicated to my marital spouse partner lady wife. The last line of my acknowledgement is thanks for the health insurance3. Some people do make a great living as a writer, are breadwinners, etc., people Jen A. Miller. But many writers need a day job, or they need a spouse with a steady paycheck and that dental insurance. We do a disservice if we benefit from such privilege and don’t acknowledge it.
Sometimes I’m asked how I make a living and I say I really don’t. The podcast makes $100 a month from Patreon. That’s it. As of now, I don’t take money for ads. Before I earned a good book advance, which I’ve been lucky enough not to have to dip into too much, to the tune of around 6,000 maybe, I worked three years as a part-time editor for a newspaper. I left just before they axed my entire section. That unemployment woulda been nice.
As many of you know, I’m a bit bi-polar in my screeds. Next week I might be ready to fling myself off a skyscraper but for now, this week has been a clusterfuck of insane goodness. I’ll take it when it comes.
- Grantland … I remember when it debuted in 2011 and wanting so desperately to write for them. They were touting how they wanted to highlight young and talented writers. I remember thinking I’m young and talented. How do you get noticed? Where was my audition? I had so, so much to learn. ↩︎
- No knock on retail. If you can set your ego aside (I couldn’t), it’s a great way to be forced into contact with people and to listen to people. Thing is, I was embarrassed to work in retail because it suggested that I had failed at my career, the thing I had invested five years of college and two years of MFA-ing. I remember running into someone I knew when I was working at Whole Foods, this after I had published a book, yada yada, and I was so embarrassed. Like I had fallen from grace or something stupid like that. It’s silly to think like that. It’s okay if you’re art doesn’t 100% support you. Fuck. ↩︎
- I’m so clever. ↩︎
