A Writer’s Prayer, Halfway Answered
By Dwight Garner
Published: August 3, 2010, New York Times

MENTOR
A Memoir
By Tom Grimes
242 pages. Tin House Books. $16.95.

Every serious fiction writer, published or unpublished, has a pile of horror stories about trying to get his or her work out into the world. The funny ones are told in bars. The ones that aren’t funny — the ones that may never be funny — are told only to therapists or to the insides of medicine cabinets.


Tom Grimes - photo Jody Grimes

Tom Grimes’s new book, “Mentor,” is ostensibly about Frank Conroy, the gifted memoirist (“Stop-Time”) and novelist (“Body and Soul”) who was the longtime director of the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa. Conroy, who died in 2005, was a major force in Mr. Grimes’s life: mentor, father figure, drinking buddy, close friend.

What “Mentor” is really about, though, is the slow-motion derailment of Mr. Grimes’s own once promising literary career, a process that took his pride before it took his sanity. This is a book about striding up to the brink of success, only to have success disembowel you with a dull steak knife, bow, and then skip away, cackling.

Mr. Grimes, now in his mid-50s, is the author of five novels. He directs the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Texas State University. In “Mentor” he flashes back two decades to when he was broke and living with his wife in Key West, Fla. He worked as a waiter when he wasn’t working on his fiction. Eventually he applied to a few writing schools, and got only rejections.

A telephone call from Conroy changed his life. “I never call anyone,” Conroy told him, “but I’ve read your manuscript.” Within a few months Mr. Grimes was teaching alongside Conroy in Iowa. To the envy and dismay of other writers at the prestigious workshop, he became the “golden boy,” the one who could do no wrong in Conroy’s eyes.


Full story at NYT.