“Embrace Your Madness”

In the fall of 2004, Tristan shipped his first draft to New York.

Silence.

He waited.

He wrote a song for Paula, “Better Days”:


Everything fell apart with dad on the rails, leaving mom at home in tinsel town …

I’m glad he stayed gone, I’m glad he stayed gone …

Mom and we to better days and dad to the sacred chao …


Finally, Tristan heard from his agent, Andrew Wylie. Grove had made an offer. Wylie apparently told him it was a low offer. (This is according to Frank Heibert; Wylie isn’t talking.) The fact that Grove contacted his agent, not Tristan directly, suggested that they didn’t merely dislike the book. They believed it was beyond saving. Kornwolf, to Tristan, was almost a 12-step rehab program in prose form, the fruit of a difficult and personal journey, the blueprint for a new life — and now his editors weren’t even going to tell him why they thought it sucked. “He hoped for something promising there so that he could see the light at the end of the tunnel,” says Heibert. “And then they made the lousy offer, and he said, oh my god … he said, I don’t know what to do.”

Entrekin disputes Heibert’s interpretation. He agrees that he read part of an initial draft “and realized it needed some work,” but denies that Grove wrote Kornwolf off. Far from it. Grove asked for revisions, which Tristan made. “He was excited about Kornwolf,” says Entrekin. “We were, too. That book had more of a hook.”

Come to think of it, Grove could have rejected Kornwolf entirely. It didn’t. Entrekin had an investment in Tristan. He had already put out two books by a guy with a funny name and not-great sales, and now he was going to put out a third, and probably a fourth and a fifth too.

Entrekin is not the bad guy here. “I fully intended to keep publishing him,” he says. “He would build an audience over time, and sometime he would get lucky.” This is how it works. Writing is hard. Building a career takes time.

Almost any other writer would have recognized the Kornwolf affair for what it was — not a tragic failure, not a wrenching event, but the exact opposite: a fairly minor and common setback, all things considered. Pretty banal in the grand scheme.

So to understand what happened next, you have to remember that banality is what always freaked Tristan out the most; not the big passionate plot twists, the infidelities, the ER visits, the dried vomit on the floor, but the gaps between them. The relative calm, the domestic peace. The little grainy adjustments it takes to maintain that peace. The decades of interesting prose and decent reviews that threatened to stretch out before him.

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