Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

preface

This is not an autobiography. God forbid! Autobiography is fueled by ego and I could make a long list of persons whose belly buttons I’d rather be contemplating than my own. Anyway, only authors who are household names should write autobiographies, and not only is my name infrequently tumbled in the lapidary of public consciousness, but those rare homes in which it’s spoken with any regularity are likely under police surveillance. I’ve even made an effort to avoid the autobiographical in my novels, wishing neither to shortchange imagination nor use up my life in literature.

I’d like to think Tibetan Peach Pie isn’t a memoir either, although it waddles and quacks enough like a memoir to be mistaken for one if the light isn’t right. What it is more precisely is a sustained narrative composed of the absolutely true stories I’ve been telling the women in my life — my wife, my assistant, my fitness trainer, my yoga teacher, my sisters, my agent, et al — over many years, and which at their insistence I’ve finally written down. In order to remember events sufficiently, I’ve had to arrange them in more or less chronological order; which, of course, contributes to the book’s resemblance to a memoir, as does the fact that the stories, as I’ve said, relate my own experiences, encounters, follies, and observations, not those of, say, Abraham Lincoln.

If Tibetan Peach Pie doesn’t read like a normal memoir, that may be because I haven’t exactly led what most normal people would consider a normal life. (My editor claims some of this stuff is so nuts even I couldn’t have made it up.) Moreover, my writing style is my writing style, whether it’s in the service of fact or fiction: a pileated woodpecker is a pileated woodpecker no matter if it roosts with the ducks.

Now, despite my contention that the events described herein are “absolutely true,” I’ve never in my life kept anything remotely resembling a journal, so they are at least somewhat subject to the effects of mnemonic erosion, and some folks who were involved at the time may recall them a bit differently. It’s the Rashomon effect. C’est la vie. I do, however, happen to possess a pretty good memory and can at a moment’s notice name the lineup of the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers and all but one or two of my ex-wives.

Whatever it may reveal about me and my personal “monkey dance of life,” including how I emerged from a Southern Baptist milieu to write nine offbeat yet popular novels published in more than twenty countries, as well as innumerable pieces for magazines and newspapers, this book also provides (perhaps more importantly) intimate verbal snapshots of, among other settings, Appalachia during the Great Depression, the West Coast during the sixties psychedelic revolution, the studios and bedrooms of bohemian America before technology voted privacy out of office, Timbuktu before Islamic fanatics crashed the party, international roving before “homeland security” threw a wet blanket over travel, and New York publishing before electrons intervened on behalf of the trees.

Oh, about the title: Tibetan peach pie is the pièce de résistance (the Holy Grail, as it were) in an old shaggy dog story, author unknown, that Zen ranch hands may well have told around the chuck wagon; a sort of parable about the wisdom of always aiming for the stars, and the greater wisdom of cheerfully accepting failure if you only reach the moon. I retold an abbreviated version in my second novel, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, back in 1976. Anyone desiring a more comprehensive retelling can write to me at: P.O. Box 338, La Conner, WA, 98257, and sooner or later it will be supplied.