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"FacebookPinterest\n\n When a dude who has deftly edited everyone from Walter Kirn to Alan Richman to James Ellroy over the course of a fourteen-year stint at your favorite men's general-interest magazine turns around and writes his own book, you read it. You read it because the author, GQ's deputy editor Michael Hainey, is a supremely talented writer, editor, and interviewer (just see this month's cover story). You read it because no less than John Jeremiah Sullivan described it as \"a book whose heartbreak and humor, in the true Irish tradition, can't be untangled.\" And you read it because the book's subject is one that any man can relate to: the story of a son trying to learn more about his father, to understand him as a man.\n\n What you find in the pages of After Visiting Friends is more or less what you'd expect: some genius-level literary fusing of forms and functions. Words set into type as if chiseled from stone letter by letter. A decade's worth of writing and reporting that takes the reader through a pastiche of narrative non-fiction, dreamy invented scenes, hard documents, and every writerly tool in-between. When you're done reading this book you will want to be a better man, a better father, and a better writer.\n\n The first step for this reader was to sit down with Hainey and talk writing, manhood, and life for two hours. You can find the highlights of this conversation below. Then go here to get and read the real thing.\n\n The becoming a better man part is up to you.\n\n What was deciding to do the book like? Was that an organic thing?\n\n I had this idea ten years ago. There were some people I used to tell: \"I'm writing a book. It's going to be about my father\u2014about growing up without a father.\" And people would say, \"You got a publisher?\" \"No, no.\" \"Oh. Good luck with that.\"\n\n But for me, I was going to write this story no matter what, and I always had supreme belief that it would be a book. I then took the journey\u2014it's not just many physical journeys across the country and to parts in between, but it's an emotional journey: inside of my family, inside myself. I think had I not said, \"I'm going to write this book,\" that would not have transpired.\n\n The book is kind of a pastiche of different scenes; there's reported scenes; there's documents; there's vignettes. It's sort of a memoir; it's sort of a reported thing: Was that decision instinctive?\n\n It was about asking myself: \"What is the best way to tell this story right now?\" and going towards that. I also come to writing through poetry; I started writing it when I was a kid and I think one thing that poetry's always taught me is an emphasis on image and concise language. What someone's taking two pages to say, maybe I'll try to say in two lines.\n\n How difficult is that for you? To be that disciplined?\n\n It's hard. It took me decades to find that voice.\n\n What did you write on? A typewriter or a keyboard?\n\n No, I write everything by longhand. I get up at 4:30 in the morning, and I write on college-ruled notebook paper, single sheets with a Bic pen, fine-point.\n\n Jesus.\n\n I write from 4:30 to 7 or so, for a week at a time, and then I'd have someone type up pages and then I'd look at them. I just can't write on a keyboard.\n\n What is it about getting up at 4:30 in the morning? Is that just something you can do?\n\n I just realized the book was a second job. It's the early shift. I also love getting up in the morning because nothing's seeped into my brain yet. There's some days where nothing comes. But you have to show up. You've gotta go into the locker room; you've gotta go punch the clock. Writing is physical. The body has to show up. You've gotta be in shape to do it. I've never really believed in this idea of inspiration; I believe in ertion.\n\n What is the difference between the craft of writing and expressing yourself?\n\n I think the expressing yourself happens in the first draft, and then the revision is about craft. You go down into the mine; you come up with some rocks, and then you polish the rocks to stone, and then the stones become diamonds.\n\n What kind of stuff did you edit in terms of your memories of growing up, if anything?\n\n A lot of the book's ambition is: How can you say the most with the fewest scenes? I come at writing as an editor. I'm always telling myself, \"Well, you can take this away and take this away and take this away.\" More is demanded of the pieces that are left, and if they're the right pieces, their impact is stronger.\n\n It's one image versus ten images. One image resonates deeper and stronger. They might all be great, but with ten, they all sort of even each other out. There's maybe five or six moments that really illuminate the feeling of growing up without a father and the feeling of being brothers alone. It was like, find those five or six moments, watch them crystallize diamond-hard, and that will carry the book.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nHainey's father, left.\n\n You went into a similar business as your dad too. He was a newspaperman. Have you ever thought about what that says about you?\n\n As I say in the book, I kind of wanted to complete his life. I was always good at writing; I always enjoyed it from the time I was a kid. So, you know, in some ways I'm like, \"Gee\"\u2014I remember thinking like, \"I'm just like my dad.\"\n\n How'd that make you feel?\n\n Good, because it was sort of like he lived on in me, and I kept it alive.\n\n What's the difference between the way you understand him now and before the book?\n\n Even though I was a man in my 40s, I still knew my father and understood my father through the eyes of a six-year-old boy. And by that, I mean my memories were finite; my perspective was a boy's perspective. Because he was stopped in time. And that's not to say he was on a pedestal; he was just\u2014well, he was a boy seen through the eyes of his six-year-old son.\n\n I come out the other side of the writing of the book not only being older now than my father was when he died, but I know him now as a man who exists in the world, as a man in full. He was a man out in the world, and I never had seen him as that. I had just seen him just as my father who was dead. And now, all of a sudden, he became fully dimensional. I can now relate to him man to man, but also man/son to man/father.\n\n Did you always know that's what the book was truly about?\n\n No, but I think Elizabeth Gilbert says it best on the book jacket, that there's not a more universal story than a boy searching for his father. By searching for \"Who is my father?\" in quotation marks, I found out who I am. Am I his son? Yeah, but I'm also my own man. He was his own man. And I think it's what we all wonder: Who did we come from? And who are those people that made us? Before I came along, what were they like?\n\n That's true. My kids love when I tell them stuff about me before they came around, and it's like \"I don't know if I want to tell you any of this stuff.\"\n\n But there will be a day when it's like, \"You know? It's what I did.\"\n\n I'll sit down: \"Dad made a lot of mistakes. Here's one.\"\n\n But what is that? It's a story, and people want to know stories. They want to know stories about you. And that's why\u2014I started the book with that quote from my grandmother, \"There's lots of stories you haven't heard.\"\n\nRead the excerpt from Michael Hainey's book, After Visiting Friends."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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