“Embrace Your Madness”

But not only in the book. “I’m much more interested in a writer like Tristan, who has a vision and natural exuberance, than someone who was well-trained at a creative writing school and writes well-crafted sentences,” his American publisher, Morgan Entrekin, once said. “Tristan lives life rather than sitting around analyzing it.” If Tristan had been anything like his contemporaries, he would have shut himself away for eight hours every day, typing, Creating, leaving the rest of his waking hours to worry about his kids, his wife, his students and his brand. Tristan never worked like that. Never lived like that. Another defining fact, come to think of it — because when the publishing world got a whiff of that old stuff, the Mailer/Carver/Kerouac musk, with the drugs that Tristan smoked and shot, of course, and the boxing, the political theater he was into, the gorilla suits, the stray pets, the volatile girlfriends, the busted marriage, the abandoned kid, the carousal across two continents, and above all the refusal to erect that crucial wall between the life and the art, between the violence on the page and the violence he trailed in his wake, that made him not only a literary It Boy, but also something else, something larger, something joyous and pure … a bit of a “legend in the making,” in Entrekin’s words … well, people went a little crazy for Tristan Egolf without really wondering why he was that way, or if he had a choice in the matter.

Tristan didn’t think he did. He saw himself as a damaged person. “I’m only good for one thing” is how he always put it — and in his manic, scissory, desperate pursuit of that one thing, he generated the appearance of a life far richer and fuller than any of our lives could ever be. We saw the one life and missed the other. Even as the legend of this cornbelt kid was unspooling, something else was happening, something inside that enormous skull was misfiring, something big and blunt was going terribly wrong.


ACCORDING TO HIS MOTHER, WHO RAISED HIM, he could write as soon as he could hold a pencil. He filled notepads faster than Paula Egolf could buy them. He scribbled the overflow inside matchbook covers, on napkins and leaves.

Paula was an artist herself, a landscape painter. She watched with pride as Tristan’s room accrued layers of the art that excited him, endless grubby piles of comic books and Dylan records peeking up through the topsoil of his flannel shirts. “I treasured his creativity over his cleanliness,” Paula says. To her way of thinking, disrupting Tristan’s mess would have been a form of critical rejection, and she knew that both of her kids would get more than enough rejection just by virtue of living where they did, in suburban Lancaster, surrounded by cornfields and Amish buggies. Hardly a hotbed of the arts. Gretchen Egolf, Tristan’s younger sister, was a budding actress, a drama nerd, and she still remembers what the local kids used to call her and her brother: “Different.” Clipped, like a cough. Diff-runt. “Different means bad,” says Gretchen, who, after years of paying her dues in plays and small TV roles, recently scored a leading role on NBC’s Journeyman. “It’d be: ‘That’s diff-runt.’”

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