Bio of an Ogre
Author: Piers AnthonyFinished: 2024-09-14
Started: 2024-08-12
Status: Read
A lightly edited account from messages to a dear book-friend, on why I worked through a distant reread of this book over the course of a couple months’ worth of nights waiting for my kid to fall asleep.
So I’m semi-hate-rereading Piers Anthony’s autobiography
Because it was the first memoir I ever read, at probably about age 11, and I wanted to do a bit of personal archaeology on that time
(screenshots of the 1969 Nebula incident)
🙄
The whole book is a heap of grievances spanning from “one time I got in this argument with a guy in the line to pick up our kids at school” to “Le Guin stole my Nebula”; boasts of what a genius he is but in a world where nobody is smart enough to recognize it; and non-sequitur objectification of women
All the same, I can’t help being compelled by the stories of his upbringing and early struggles as a writer — getting thousands of words out per day, in pencil on a clipboard on his lap while wrangling his infant daughter; adding another yet-unsold novel to the pile, while his wife worked to support the family for another month…
Getting in disputes in fanzines and writers’ conferences; it’s heady sci-fi new wave era stuff
Plus, he’s the guy who introduced me to fiction not-strictly-for-kids, which will always be a warm association
Remembering going on my first “long” flight at 9 years old, Chicago to San Jose, and my brother-in-law put his The Source of Magic in my hand to read on the plane
Which I did, the entire way, prolly accompanied by unlimited 7-Up or whatever
Later on, my dad brought me to Father Steve, the “cool” priest at our church, and prodded me to tell him who my favorite author was. “…Piers Anthony…”, at which he perked up and started telling me all about the other authors I should get into next. Not long after, he had a huge box of sci-fi for me, insisting I take the whole thing home and enjoy it.
It was an intimidating collection of books, and while I looked at them and flipped through them a lot, I only really got into a small fraction of them. I didn’t have the attention span, especially versus all the other entertainments of the early 90s, for much that was deeper than Xanth.
In retrospect, he recognized Anthony as an experimental 60s–70s new wave guy, and I knew him as an 80s settled, formulaic fantasy potboiler guy
Sure wish I had that few shelves worth of books now, tho
Or even that I could remember most of what was on it