Jan. 1, 2018 - Steve Pieczenik
05:30
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hi, this is Dr. Steve Pachank, and this is Steve Talks. | |
| Music Greetings! | |
| For January 2018, I've opened up this year by swimming in the lake here in North Central Florida. | |
| It's about 55 degrees, but I thought that was the best way to greet the new year with a real cold shower and an awakening as to what will happen in the future. | |
| I want to say a few words about somebody I knew. | |
| Somebody I didn't know too well, but somebody who reached out to me and unfortunately died a few days ago. | |
| She's a very talented writer and her name is Sue Grafton. | |
| She lived in California in a place called Santa Barbara and was a very lovely lady. | |
| I didn't know her too well, but she had reached out to me On several occasions and I had met her and her lovely husband Stephen Humphreys. | |
| She reached out to me because she was interested in why someone like myself who had been a doctor and a psychiatrist ended up writing novels and particularly political thrillers. | |
| I don't think she really read most of my novels, and I didn't really ask her. | |
| And in turn, she knew that I had not really read her excellent series on the alphabetic crimes, but I knew she was an excellent mystery writer for many of the people whom I have worked with. | |
| I like Sue Grafton. | |
| She reached out to me and she was vivacious, she was inquisitive, she was a lively individual. | |
| She had many interesting facets to her life. | |
| She had been a medical secretary, a medical clerk, and she wanted to know why, if I wrote these novels, political thrillers, why I didn't get into the mystery genre. | |
| And I explained to her that I really liked writing what I knew about. | |
| And most of my life wasn't about mysteries as it was about double dealing and political psychology and psychological operations. | |
| In turn, I asked her, how did she start to write novels? | |
| And she told me something very interesting about herself. | |
| She said that after the age of five, if you don't have a very good childhood, in other words, if you're messed up around the age of five, you're going to be very effective in terms of creating a life of discontent, and from that discontent you will become a very effective writer. | |
| And I found that quite fascinating. | |
| She was not a psychiatrist, but she was a highly intuitive woman who I enjoyed talking to on the two occasions that we had met, both in Maryland and Santa Barbara. | |
| I will miss her. | |
| And the reason I will miss her is because she's the end of a genre, the mystery novel. | |
| But more importantly, she represents to me the end of the novel in general. | |
| As many of you know, the novel or the book, as we know it, in the format of a book, is gone. | |
| The bookstores are gone. | |
| The individual local bookstore is gone. | |
| The regional bookstores are gone. | |
| The chains are gone. | |
| And for the most part, I've had a very successful career and a very grateful career, thanks to Herman Golub, Simon Schuster, Robert Gottlieb, William Morris, Mel Berger, Jeff Rovin, and many other people. | |
| And the people at Warner Books, Nancy Nyman and Mel Parker and Charles Spicer at St. | |
| Martin's. | |
| But the reality is that, for the most part, we have entered into an age, as I've talked about before, of one and zeros, where our attention span can no longer hold on to about 300 to 400 pages of a novel. | |
| And I think from time to time I had discussed that with Susan, and she didn't agree with me. | |
| She felt that the novel would continue, and I felt that the novel would eventually find its own I want to say goodbye and rest in peace to Susan Grafton and thank her for the brief time that I knew her and I want to quote something she once said to | |
| me. | |
| Steve, she said, you know, you and I live on borrowed time, and we might as well use it as best as we can. | |
| And I said, Susan, you're absolutely right. | |
| And in turn, I quoted something to her from Sinclair Lewis, and I said, you know, the novelist comes out of two points, either being an alcoholic or desperation. | |
| And I told her, you and I don't drink, so it must be out of desperation. | |
| Anyway, Susan, rest in peace. | |
| Good night and good luck. | |
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