Book Nook - The Great Dick

There are many great fiction authors and many great nonfiction authors, but obviously a smaller number of authors who’ve written excellent books in both categories. The skill sets for each category are similar in certain ways and different in others. Some are able to make the transition skillfully - Alice Walker, Stephen King, and Barbara Kingsolver. Yet it is still a challenge. Why is it? Why is it so difficult to do both? How can one navigate it?

I had a chance to interview Barry Maher, an author who has done both and seen the release of his debut novel, The Great Dick. Maher is an acclaimed nonfiction author of Filling the Glass (McGraw-Hill), whose work has been translated into multiple languages and featured by NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, and The Wall Street Journal. Now, Maher has taken a creative leap few dare to make — reinventing himself as a fiction writer.

What was the inspiration behind your book?

In a way, the story of The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon started in Asia. I was speaking on a cruise when I realized I could no longer figure out what the hands of the clock meant. The next day, during a session, I introduced the ship’s captain. Twenty minutes later I picked him out of the audience and asked him what he did for a living. (The uniform did look a tad familiar.) That same day, I gave up trying to understand foreign currency. Even American money was getting tricky. In Viet Nam, I handed a vendor two hundreds and a ten for a $7.00 baseball cap. It was a very nice cap.

Back home, the first thing my doctor did was have me draw a clock face at ten minutes to three. The second thing he did was take away my driver’s license. Then he sent me for an immediate MRI. The nurse there wouldn’t comment on the results, but when I asked where the restroom was, she said, “I can’t let you go in there alone.”

I explained that bathroom visitation was a particular expertise of mine. 

“Like telling time?” she asked. “You need to talk to your neurosurgeon.”

“I have a neurosurgeon?” Just what I always wanted.

I also had a brain tumor—the size of a basketball. Or maybe the neurosurgeon said “baseball.” I wasn’t tracking too well at that point. Still, I quickly grasped he was planning on carving open my skull with a power saw. 

“I don’t really need to tell time,” I said. “Or I can always buy a digital watch.”

Everyone said my neurosurgeon—or, as I thought of him, “Chainsaw Charlie”—was brilliant. My problem was that I’ve spent my life around intelligent people, and I’ve always believed human intelligence was overrated. To me, on a scale of everything there is to know in the universe, the main difference between Einstein and Koko the Wonder Chimp was that Einstein couldn’t pick up bananas with his feet. (As far as I know.)  

Eventually though, I went under the knife—or in this case, the power saw.  Maybe I had a seizure. The doctors weren’t sure. That might explain what happened. Because I came out of the surgery with Lady Gaga singing non-stop in my head and a vivid, fully formed story—like a memory of something I’d just watched—complete with open crypts, dark spells, sudden death and the Ralph Lauren version of the Manson Family. Lady Gaga shut up after a couple days, but the story stayed with me. And once I was able, I spent a couple of years putting it all down, working it out, trying to get it just right. And that’s The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon. 

What do you hope readers will take away from your novel?

Hope. The feeling that no matter how we may have screwed up in the past, the future is still ours to create. Nothing is written until—one way or the other—we write it.

How did a career in corporate communication prepare you for fiction writing?

My career before writing The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon was far more checkered than that. I started out committing journalism, of sorts—freelance. My stuff probably appeared in a hundred different publications, and in order to eat I had about that many different jobs. I’ve been a corporate executive, but I’ve also washed dishes. I’ve worked for minimum wage and I’ve made thousands for a one hour speech. I’ve lived in a house on the beach, and I’ve literally lived on the beach—with the sand and the seagulls. 

I am neither a great dick—I hope—nor a dysfunctional demon. But I have been a lot of things. And I think that lifetime of varied experiences helped me to develop and understand all my human and non-human characters—even in some truly bizarre situations.

What has been your biggest surprise in the transition from non-fiction to fiction writing? 

My biggest surprise is how well The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon has been received by all types of readers. I have to admit that, before publication, when I got so many well-known authors to agree to read it, I was concerned about sending it to them. What if they all hated it? And I braced myself for negative comments and polite lukewarm responses. When, one after the other, they all raved about the book, that was incredibly gratifying. And a huge relief.

How did you go about developing the characters?

I have no idea. It felt more like they were revealed than developed. I knew the story, testing the characters against those situations showed me who they really were. Sometimes they turned out to be quite different than I expected. Jonathan O’Reilly, for example, was much more likeable and a lot funnier than I’d thought he’d be. He threatened to steal every scene he was in. 

What was process like from start to finish?

Writing The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon, was a steady process of improving, constantly honing and rewriting, polishing every scene until I couldn’t make it any better. When I finally got to a draft where there was almost nothing I could improve and I was doing little more than undoing previous changes, I decided it was done. Still, I went through the book at least twice more while it was with the publisher.

 Are you planning on a sequel or maybe for fiction novels separate from The Great Dick?

The answer is yes! I’m currently working on a completely separate supernatural thriller—a ghost story. And yes, I’m also planning a sequel to The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon. The book was written as a stand-alone novel, but the characters and the excitement scream for another story. Readers have told me they can’t wait to see what happens next. I feel the same.