Rejection turns gold - novelist Tristan Egolf - IVTR

Interview, Jan, 1999 by Brad Goldfarb

A twenty-two year old aspiring writer moves to Paris, is discovered busking on the Pont des Arts by the daughter of a famous novelist, and after seventy-plus rejections ultimately finds a home for his novel with the esteemed publishing house Gallimard. Sound like the stuff of a Danielle Steel romance? Maybe so, but it's also the entirely true adventure of Tristan Egolf, whose debut novel is already garnering comparisons to William Faulkner and Thomas Pynchon

BRAD GOLDFARB; Unlike so many first novels, Lord of the Barnyard (Grove Atlantic) has none of the preciousness or obvious autobiographical references typical of a young writer's earliest work.

TRISTAN EGOLF: There is autobiographical material, but only people who know me very well would be able to pick up on it. I wanted to create enough of a wall that no one would recognize the stuff taken from my life. Maybe I'm a little paranoid, but I've never kept a journal either. There're too many prying eyes in this world, and if you keep a journal, it will be read. Personally, I have never had a piece of even potentially incriminating evidence lying around my house that hasn't been discovered in one way or another. It always comes back to haunt you.

BG: Would it reveal too much to share a few of the bits in the book that are autobiographical?

TE: The chicken farming.

BG: You were a chicken farmer?

TE: Well, I wasn't exactly lord of the barnyard, but I took care of a lot of pigs and chickens and sheep. Between the ages of around eleven and eighteen I grew up in Lancaster County, Penn., a rural part of the state.

BG: And before that?

TE: We moved all over. I was born overseas; my father was a writer and we traveled through Europe a lot when I was younger. After my parents got divorced, I moved with my mother, a painter, and my stepfather, a bicycle explorer, to Washington, D.C., and then to Louisville, Ky. My sister's an actress and we're all in cutthroat competition. I don't mean we work against each other, but we keep each other moving.

BG: When did you leave Lancaster?

TE: After I graduated from high school. I moved to Philadelphia and studied at Temple University for two semesters - the worst mistake I could have made.

BG: Was it that bad?

TE: It was a waste. I spent years afterward unlearning things. It's not that I wasn't into learning; school just wasn't for me. Reading and teaching myself has always worked better.

BG: Were you dreaming of being a writer?

TE: Not necessarily as a profession, but I knew that was all I would ever do.

BG: Did your teachers encourage you?

TE: Some did. I used to enter those scholastic writing competitions, and once when I was around seventeen I placed in the nationals. That recognition was the last I got until my book was picked up by Gallimard. For eight years I couldn't get anything published, not a single article. Part of that time I was living in Philly and generally going crazy - you know, the whole sow-my-wild-oats thing. But I never stopped writing.

BG: Now that you've come back to America, in fact to New York, do you plan on staying a while?

TE: Yeah. I've been rootless for too long. I need my own bed and my own bookshelf. The next two books I want to write are in my head already, so I've got enough to keep me busy until I'm thirty-two.

BG: Was the fact that you were alone and in a foreign country a factor when you were writing Barnyard?

TE: Oh, yeah. This book wouldn't exist without that. When I first arrived in Paris I didn't speak any French at all, so I was pretty isolated and alone. And I needed that. I'd had a very high profile in my own little world in Philadelphia. There is also an advantage to removing yourself from your subject matter. If you're writing about Kentucky, there's no better place to be than Pads, France. Once I got myself situated, got my own little flat - just a tiny little room, really - and got myself squared away, it took me a solid eighteen months to finish Lord of the Barnyard. I worked at it seven days a week, usually eight hours a day, but sometimes up to fourteen or fifteen. I had to force myself to take time off. The exchange rate was a lot worse than it is now, so I made money playing music in Irish bars and on the Pont des Arts.

BG: So music offered a way to feed yourself while you devoted yourself to this process.

TE: I was never rolling in dough from it, but it was enough to survive on. Just before I left Philadelphia my band was offered a record contract, but I got out of town before we even recorded track one. I knew that if I signed on the dotted line, it was going to be years before I'd free myself to do the writing.

BG: So you must have relished the experience of devoting day after day to your book.

TE: It was intense. I was 100 percent absorbed in it. I remember I finished the last chapter in about a week, and maybe the last four days of that I did nothing but write, drinking pots of coffee, smoking cigarettes, hunched over a desk, pacing back and forth in this little five-by-five room, just feeling like death. There's a certain kind of trance you fall into when you're writing, and when you come out of it you're incapable of communicating with people at all. You can drink, but that's about it. Patrick Modiano [the prominent French novelist] and his family were just wonderful to me during that time. At night they would have me over for dinner, and I'd arrive looking like a zombie. They knew then that I was onto something because Patrick, of course, has looked like that throughout his life. And after he'd been working and I'd been working we would sit there looking dazed in the same way, like we'd been separated at birth.