My Guy Larry

Like Holden Caulfield, I always fancy sitting down and talking with the writer of any work I love. Right now (actually for the last 33 years), I've imagined conversing at length with Pulitzer prizewinner Larry McMurtry, whose LONESOME DOVE, BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (screenplay adapted from story by Annie Proulx)and TERMS OF ENDEARMENT were huge commercial successes that most of the planet could identify with.

However, for me, McMurtry became my guy for two much smaller pieces: an essay he wrote for Atlantic magazine's "Texas" issue in spring 1975(?), and a long essay (short autobiography) called WALTER BENJAMIN AT THE DAIRY QUEEN, published in 1999 following McMurtry's heart surgery a year or two before that.

I don't recall all of Atlantic's focus on Texas in spring 1975, but I specifically remember discovering Larry McMurtry and Molly Ivins in pieces they wrote for that issue.

Larry, then living up East, wrote of his experiences as an expatriate Texan coming home for a big event--a bbq, maybe, and a cocktail party with it. His descriptions were hilarious--not the least for his comparisons to what he figured it must be to be an expatriate Mississippian coming home to even crazier people and crazier experiences. Ironically, I read his essay on a Delta Airlines flight between Dallas, TX and Jackson, MS; I was flying from my adopted Montana to a family reunion in Mississippi.

Putting it mildly, Larry "spoke" to me in that piece, helping me to laugh at, enjoy and appreciate rather than resist, resent or explain away my origins and identity. He became My Guy right then. But here's why I've continued to love him:

First, he loves used books--not only for their arrestingly written, voraciously consumed contents but also for their looks, the way they feel and the fun it is to find them whether searching for a particular title or merely lucking onto a treasure to hold dear until the love wears thin--which, more than likely, it will. I know those passions.

Second, Larry unselfconsciously admits ambiguous ties to "home." Yet when all is said, read and written, he's learned enough about himself, his family, his friends, his books and the world he lives in to know who he is, how and why he came to be that way and why it's folly to deny or pretend otherwise. He accepts "it," makes it his, and moves on to the next phase of selfhood. He's Larry for good. Good for Larry!

What's more, his solid self-identity has helped create a successful, commercial self-identity for his dusty West Texas hometown of Archer City. There he's put his vast collection of books on display and/or for sale in shops he's opened for tourists. I want to visit there someday--if, that is, I can scrape together the gold to pay for the gasoline. Blame THAT on another expatriate Texan--one who occupies the White House, is married to a librarian, yet famously is NOT a lover of books!