Francisco’s Journal

The Last Summer of the Death Warriors, my fourth novel, officially comes out today. I started to write Death Warriors only a few months after submitting the final draft for Marcelo in the Real World. Like the other books that I have written, the seed for this one had been inside of me for many years. The seed was simply this: two very different young men (one very philosophical and idealistic and the other one very emotional and phyisical) get involved in an adventure and are transformed by each other in the process. We are used to thinking of “adventure” as something that involves physical risk, but I wanted my adventure to be about spiritual risk, about the meaning of life and the risk of not finding it. I have to confess that it was a difficult book to write. Marcelo in the Real World was so well received that I wondered whether I would ever write another book like that. It took a couple of months of struggle to finally accept that this was a different book, with its own truths to tell and its own voice. Death Warriors is a deeply personal book. Personal not in the sense that it is autobiographical, but in the sense that I lived and suffered with Pancho and D.Q. as I wrote about them. I wish this book well on this day. May it touch readers as deeply as it touched me.  

Marcelo in the Real World was the recipient of this year’s Schneider Family Book Award. I am so very proud and honored to have received this award. It is a very meaningful award to me. The award is given for “a book that embodies an artistic expression of the disability experience for child and adolescent audiences.” The award, for me, recognizes the many young men and women who suffer because their perception of the world differs from that of a neuro-typical person. The award is also a recognition that “artistic expression” can take us into the world of the non-neuro-typical person like nothing else. People sometimes ask me how I came upon Marcelo’s voice, a voice that resembles the voice of so many young people with Asperger’s syndrome, and ultimately I have no answer other than to say that the voice was a gift and also that somewhere in me I too must have Marcelo’s voice, I too must see the world the way he sees it, if only in a small way. I am glad there are awards like the Schneider Award.

For the first time in my writing career, a book of mine has appeared on various Best Book of the Year lists. I’ve been wondering for a couple of weeks now as to how to respond (at least to myself). I have referenced the various lists and commendations elsewhere on this website, but I felt that this praise for the book, proud and honored as I am of receiving it, needed to be put into perspective (at least to myself). I think of the many good books that didn’t get listed and which deserve to be read. I remember a couple of books of mine that have gone by unnoticed - heartfelt books as worthy to be read, in my view, as Marcelo. So I wanted to say something (at least to myself) about lists and awards and competitions but all I could think of were the words of T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets (East Coker).

And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to
conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot
hope
To emulate -but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under
conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

I thought I would get philosophical (for a change!) and ask what it means to love a book. I often hear the phrase: “I liked it but I didn’t love it”, applied to a book. It surprises me to hear the word love so selectively applied to a book when it is so easily bandied about otherwise: “I love these potato chips.” It seems that we have more reverence for the word “love” when we refer to a book. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just my own inner desire to save the preciousness of the word by using it only when I believe it to be true love. It seems to me that love for a book entails both the rapture of first love and the commitment of forever love. If that is the case, no wonder I find it hard to love just any book. By “rapture of first love” I mean that recognition of the book’s beauty, its goodness, its literary qualities all of which are experienced in a kind of rapture, a losing of myself in the world of the book. (Sounds very much like falling in love for a person, doesn’t it?). By “Commitment of forever love” I mean that I choose, that I select and prefer this book to the many other books I have read. It means that the book is now a part of me and I a part of it. It means that I don’t want to leave it, that even as I finish reading it, I already want to return it. It means that along with the passion of the initial rapture there is also a peace that is intuitively recognized as lasting. This is true love for me. I only want to add that true love is subjective. There are “classics” that I don’t love and there are what many would consider poorly written books that I love with all my heart. With these last kind there is a recognition of souls that takes places that pierces through the surface. May our hearts be always full of love.

Every once in a while I get invited to talk at various types of events. I don’t know exactly why, but whenever I finish my talk, I feel a mild sense of disgust at myself. Part of the problem is that one of the reasons I get invited in the first place is to talk about my books and about myself and so what I say sounds (at least to me) like so much ego-puffing and self-promotion. Professors and other scholarly types get to talk about a topic that doesn’t have anything to do with themselves. But what can I talk about other than writing and the writing process and the themes treated in my books? I feel like I should quickly become an expert and come up with a general topic such as: “Jung, the collective unconscious, and the prevalence of vampires in young adult literature.” Was there ever a time when an author wrote and the book went off and that was it? I’m only complaining a little bit. Because Marcelo has something like Asperger’s syndrome, I’ve been invited to speak to organizations that are interested or involved with AS. A week or so I spoke before the Asperger’s Association of New England and got some of very tough questions from young people with AS who had read the book with an incredible eye for detail. A couple of months ago, I was invited to a class at the Perkins School in Lancaster Massachusetts, where young people with AS had studied the book. I walk away from talks like these enriched. Drained but enriched. Sometimes I think that there’s only enough energy in the creative reservoir and you can use it either to write or to talk about writing. There are times when it feels right to talk about my writing and my books and there are times when it just doesn’t feel right. Maybe I haven’t quite found the perspective that sees talking as reaching out, as being generous, as an expression of gratitude for the publication and interest in my books. But even if I manage to see talking in the right light, I hope to always remember that writing comes first and talking second.