Your Book That No One Reads

“In general, I try to be very honest in my memoirs. If I lose a few friendships, so what? On the other hand, I sometimes say the best way to keep a secret is to publish it, since no one reads it. My books aren’t indexed. So anyone who wants to know what I wrote about him has to read the whole thing.”

That’s Edmund White. I read this quip shortly after I published my memoir, Culture Clash: Environmental Politics in New Mexico Communities. It’s only kind of a memoir, really more of a political analysis of what went on in the 1990s over control of natural resources in the land based communities of northern New Mexico. It qualifies as a memoir, I guess, because I was not only a journalist covering these events but an activist who lived in the communities and played a role as the battles ensued.

 Unlike White, however, I didn’t lose any friends over what I said in the book—I only went after enemies—but my opinion of them went south when I realized his second point, that they weren’t going to read the book anyway. I had to nag my kids to read it (to his credit, one of them had a long conversation/critique with me about it). One of my closest friends apparently read it but then never said a word about it to me until I nagged her, too. Another one, whose book I was helping edit, has obviously never read it. Several others, whom I informed that it was coming out, never asked me about it again.

Then I published another book called Stories From Life’s Other Side: People Living on the Margins of Modern Day Society. I wrote these stories over many years as I encountered the characters who gave birth to these tales of struggle, grit, and acceptance. Same story.

So does this indicate that people don’t read or that people don’t know how to be friends or that everybody is so self-involved that you can’t really parse any meaning?

Yes, some of my friends and colleagues did read the books: several of them gave them good reviews in Taos Friction, La Jicarita, and Enchantment and several others told me they really enjoyed reading them (including John Nichols and Lucy Lippard). My thanks to all of you.

So what do I do now? Work on another book that no one is going to read?