Dear Reader,
Today's guest author is Bill Landay, author of All That Is Mine I Carry With Me. He was written three previous novels: Defending Jacob, which won the Strand Critics Award for best novel; The Strangler, listed as a best crime novel of the year by the Los Angeles Times, The Daily Telegraph, and others; and Mission Flats, winner of the Dagger award for best first crime novel. A former assistant district attorney, he lives in Boston.
In Bill's new book, All That Is Mine I Carry With Me... A mother vanished. A father presumed guilty. There is no proof. There are no witnesses. For the children, there is only doubt...
Reach out to Bill via https://www.williamlanday.com/about/
I have always been a sports fan. Not a casual, "I'll watch if I have nothing better to do" sort of fan. I'm talking about obsession.
I could as easily chart my life by the rise and fall of the various Boston teams as by the sort of milestones that non-fans use--births and deaths, schools attended, decades, etc. My sports life began with the mighty Bruins of the early 1970s, with their superstar, Bobby Orr. It continued with the noble Celtics of the mid 70s (Cowens, Havlicek, JoJo White) and the heartbreaking Red Sox of the late 70s. The 80's were the era of Larry Bird and the Celtics. The 90s, a string of disappointments. Then the tragedy and redemption of the beleaguered Red Sox, a team that intelligent, rational adults genuinely believed was under a curse. And the rise of the Patriots behind their increasingly oddball star Tom Brady. These are all cherished personal memories.
Here's the thing: I know none of this makes sense. All sports fans know it does not make sense. I have never met any of these people. Tom Brady, Larry Bird, and Pedro Martinez do not care about me, have never even heard of me; why should I have cared so deeply whether they succeeded or failed? Yet I did. I still do. I can't help it. If you are a sports fan, you understand.
Tellingly, individual sports have never engaged me at all. I do not follow golf or tennis or cycling or auto racing. I find it hard to work up any interest in Tiger Woods or Roger Federer, say. They are just strangers. I admire them, I suppose, but I have never lost any sleep when they came up short.
That is because individual athletes lack the key to real, heartfelt, all-in fandom: identification. The true fan believes--against all reason--that the athlete represents him. (I will avoid gender-neutral pronouns here because this delusion is a lot more common among men.) The true fan believes that, because the athlete's uniform says BOSTON or NEW YORK or LOS ANGELES, the players' success or failure actually says something about those places. The true fan--no matter how accomplished and rational he may be in his professional life, be he a surgeon, a judge, or a virtuoso violinist--will happily wear a player's uniform shirt to a game in order to assert his tribal loyalty and his affinity for that player.
Let's stipulate, again, that this is illogical. It is nuts.
But as a professional storyteller myself, I can't say it is completely nuts. Haven't we all--we novel readers, I mean--identified with some character whom we know to be unreal? Haven't we yearned for the (fictional) lovers to come together? Haven't we wept at the (fictional) hero's tragic death?
And what is sports but an endless, unscripted story? A game, a season, an athlete's career--we see the same dramatic arcs, the Hero's Journey, over and over.
The striving, conflict, the success and failure.
It is irrational to care about these stories, perhaps. So be it. We humans love our stories.
Go, Celtics!
-- Bill Landay
Reach out to Bill via https://www.williamlanday.com/about/
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
This month's Penguin Classic is The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe, Introduction by Rachel Syme. Start Reading and enter for your chance to win a copy of your own.
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