Full Description
With a foreword by Lee Child.
Andy Martin spent a year in the company of Lee Child, creator of tough-guy hero Jack Reacher. With Child is the diary of their adventures, tracking the publication and reception of Make Me, the writing of Night School at an apartment in Manhattan, the filming of Never Go Back in New Orleans, all the agony and ecstasy of the creative process and the sheer hard work of selling a bestseller. They go on the road together, from TV studios to bookstores, from Harvard to Stockholm, amid literary conferences and gunshows, rivalries and reviews ranging from adulatory to murderous. We meet fellow writers like Stephen King and David Lagercrantz and Karin Slaughter, and dissect the latest novel from Jonathan Franzen.
But Martin also reaches out to Child's legion of readers in America and around the world. He tracks down a woman in Texas whose name appears in the home invasion scene in Make Me; he goes up a mountain in Montana in search of the only reader who thinks Reacher is a "lightweight"; and he talks to obsessive fans from Europe to South Africa who find salvation or consolation in the colossal form of Jack Reacher.
This compelling account of life on the road with Lee Child demonstrates that readers are just as important as writers in the making of modern fiction.
Contents
Foreword Before: 'A Lot of Writers are Like That, They Start with Dialogue' Fall
1 The Gorgeous Feeling
2 The Dearth of the Author
3 Before Midnight
4 Like a Cockroach
5 The Zipless Fuck
6 Mysterious
7 The Pressure Keeps Building
8 I'm not an Author
9 Having an Orgasm, Standing Up
10 Stephen King is Shocked
11 A Frustratingly One-Way Telephone Conversation (Except Just at the End)
12 Attempt at an Exhaustive Description of People at Barnes & Noble Who were Having their Photographs taken with Lee Child
13 The Deranged, Obsessive Fan
14 Lunch with Lydia Lair
15 On Tour with Lee Child: Publisher's Schedule
16 Comment on that 'Gruelling' Publicity Schedule
17 A Novel without Reacher
18 Lee Child's Ultimate Nightmare
19 Inside Fort Z
20 In the Four Seasons, Washington DC
21 Where did you get the Folding Toothbrush from?
22 Precursors of Reacher
23 How to Say 'Said'
24 Is Make me Funny?
25 Reacher The Reader
26 Breakfast, Sunday, 27 September 2015
27 A Binary Praxis of Antagonistic Reciprocity
28 Back to School
29 Can I Help you?
30 Cup of Tea, With a Side Order of Napkin
31 'You're not Going to Believe this, But ...'
32 Jouïssance
33 On the First Chapter of Lee Child's Make me
34 His Dying wish Winter
35 Carl (1)
36 Elsa (The Opposite of the Toothbrush)
37 The Man who Refused to Read Make me
38 Mamma Mia! (x 5)
39 Jack Reacher vs Lisbeth Salander
40 Carl (2)
41 Misery
42 Book Ends
43 Sam
44 Clueless
45 Karina
46 Zeno and the Art of the Head-Butt
47 Reacher vs West Germany
48 But who is Going to Play Lee Child in the Movie?
49 Two New York Scenes, On the Same Day, Containing Antithetical Reactions to Lee Child
50 Ennui
51 The Woman who Hated Reacher
52 Tom
53 Psychosocial Acceleration Theory (Never go back)
54 While Reacher Sleeps
55 Fanmail Spring
56 The Fortune Cookie
57 Fear and Firearms in Las Vegas
58 The Letters Pages of the London Review of Books
59 A Blonde Walks through the Door with a Gun in her Hand
60 The End of that Conversation, In which Lee Compares himself to Homer
61 Tweets
62 300 Pages, One Insight
63 The Function of Crime
64 Crimethrillergirl
65 The End of the Novel
After: In Case you Wanted to know What Happened to that Romance with Chang
Acknowledgements
