Advertisments

Much Ado About Publishing

A Kinky New Book

by Nina L. Diamond

It’s Labor Day evening and I'm talking on the phone to Kinky Friedman. He’s at home near Kerrville, Texas, at his Echo Hill Ranch, where his late parents used to run a summer camp, and I’m at my desk at home in Austin.

He'd much rather be sitting in the Texas Governor’s mansion right now, but instead he’s about to embark on another book tour.

Kinky talks politics and the progressive issues that concern him (abolishing the death penalty in Texas, health care, education) not only because he’s still in candidate-mode, but because that’s what his new humor book is about.

“It’s a view of what I learned after the campaign,” he says.

And what did he learn? The title pretty well sums it up.

You Can Lead a Politician to Water, But You Can’t Make Him Think, the next in Kinky’s long line of non-fiction books, will be published by Simon & Schuster in October, but by next October, Kinky may very well be running for Governor again.

“I don’t think God would’ve won as an Independent,” Kinky laughs, referring to his 2006 attempt as an Independent to unseat the Republican governor Rick Perry. “If I’d run as a Democrat I could’ve won, but I didn’t know that at the time.”

So, next time, in 2010, if he’s got the backing of the Democratic Party, Kinky says he’ll give it another shot, though he won’t be making that decision officially until sometime next fall.

As I noted when I wrote about Kinky last year, (A "Kinky" Book Tour, July-August 2006), if Kinky wins, "The only person who's happier about this than Kinky is his publisher...Can you think of a more original or effective way to promote your book than running (and maybe actually becoming) The Governor of the Great State of Wherever You Happen to Live?"

For any good humorist, humor is serious business about serious business. And no matter what soapbox Kinky’s been on – the musical, the literary, the political – he’s used satire and wit to call our attention to life’s serious absurdities with the hope that then maybe we can all do something about them.

“You’ve gotta be miserable to write funny,” he says.

And there’s no better way to become miserable than to take an honest look at the world around you.

Kinky Friedman first started doing that professionally back in the 1970s. After a stint in the Peace Corps, he formed his now infamous satirical country-rock band, Kinky Friedman & The Texas Jewboys, and made a national name for himself with such ditties as “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven & Your Buns in the Bed”, “The Ballad of Charles Whitman” (the sniper who fired from the famed University of Texas tower), and the anti-anti-Semitic classic “They Ain’t Making Jews like Jesus Anymore.”

Since the 1980s, the literary Kinky Friedman has taken center stage with 18 superb best-selling mystery novels in a series that stars Kinky as himself if he had also stumbled into being an amateur detective, and one outside the series that’s just as entertaining, insightful, funny, and heartbreaking as the rest.

Heartbreaking? That’s right, you’re not hallucinating, I said heartbreaking. In his novels, and quite often in his non-fiction magazine articles and books, Kinky’s magic is his ability to crack your heart just as often as he cracks you up.

It’s been said that every writer’s first novel is just thinly disguised autobiography. Well, after 19 novels, readers have learned a hell of a lot about the real Kinky Friedman through the fictional adventures of his alter-ego of the same name.

“Fiction is a great way to tell the truth,” he laughs, adding that there’s plenty of truth about his own life, experiences, and thoughts in the Kinky character that narrates his mystery series.

Unfortunately, that series is over now because Kinky the author killed off Kinky the character.

Prior to a few months ago, I hadn’t read Kinky’s fiction yet. I’d only read tons of his magazine articles, Texas Monthly columns (which he had to give up when he ran for Governor), and his non-fiction books. But, once I read one of the mystery novels, I was hooked like everyone else.

Like the rest of his readers, I want more. His novels are like that old Lay's potato chip commercial: “You can’t eat just one.” They’re highly addictive. When I finished one, I started the next one less than a minute later. And that wasn’t just because I was reading a lot of them in a fairly short time as I prepared for our Labor Day conversation. I managed to gobble up seven of them and I will polish off the other twelve. But, unlike the old Doritos commercial that promised, “Don’t worry, we’ll make more,” Kinky doesn’t have any plans to continue the series, at least not until he can figure out how to do that with a dead narrator.

Whenwe spoke, as both a writer and a reader I urged him to write another one. Maybe it’s only a dream that he died. Maybe Kinky can solve crimes from the afterlife. Nah, too cheesy. Then, today, it hit me: A pile of manuscripts is discovered and published after detective Kinky’s death. Perfect! Pretty low on the cheese factor, too. So, Kinky, there’s your solution, free of charge.

I’m not holding my breath that he’ll write another novel anytime in the near future. Unfortunately for readers (but perhaps fortunately for Texans), Kinky Friedman’s passion lies in governing, now. So, if he does decide to run again, we may have to wait a long time for another peek into detective Kinky’s wacko, yet oddly comforting, world of the beloved puppet head (read the books, you’ll fall in love with the puppet head, too).

While campaigning, he missed writing “a bit,” he says. And, he does have an idea for his next non-fiction book, though when he does that project depends upon whether he runs for governor again or not.

The book’s title is quintessential Kinky: Tuesdays with Moron.

He’d interview famous musicians, he says, including “friends like Dr. John, Bob Dylan, Willie, Jimmy Buffett, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell.”

Even if Kinky Friedman runs as a Democrat, his independent spirit will always prevail.

When I asked him what he thought his legacy would be, I realized that his answer applies as much to Kinky the writer and performer as it does to Kinky the potential governor:

“As a dealer in hope. Someone who hasn’t been paid off and doesn’t belong to anyone who controls him. A renaissance Texan.”

And that's exactly what we've always liked about him.

* * * * *

Nina L. Diamond is a journalist, essayist, and the author of Voices of Truth: Conversations with Scientists, Thinkers & Healers. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Omni, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, and The Miami Herald.

Ms. Diamond was a writer and performer on Pandemonium, the National Public Radio (NPR) satirical humor program, for its entire run in Miami and select markets nationwide from 1984-1998. As an editor, she works frequently with other authors and journalists on both fiction and non-fiction.

---