I was a real piece of work as a teen. That’s why I have a soft spot for legendary a@@holes. I’ve been reading the work of John O’Hara all summer and just checked out Geoffrey Wolfe’s bio of the man, The Art of Burning Bridges” and can really relate.

Is it fate or irony that the first boy I fell madly in love with at Yale grew up near Pottsville, PA, O’Hara’s hometown and subject of his first novel, Appointment in Samarra. He came up with the title while visiting Dorothy Parker, one of his best friends. The story goes that Parker directed O’Hara to a passage in W. Somerset Maugham’s play Sheppy in which a merchant’s servant tries to evade Death, as personified as a woman, by fleeing Baghdad to Samarra. Death was just as surprised to see the man in Baghdad. “For I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra,” says she.

O’Hara may have the reputation as a jerk, but he was a master writer and I am learning so much from his work. He had a clear style with killer dialogue.

I’ve almost finished his Hollywood novel, The Big Laugh (1962). It’s ironic that there’s this perception that few writers who went to Hollywood were able to write novels while they were there, yet one of the town’s biggest lushes, O’Hara, managed to bang out more fiction while living there. He wrote Hope of Heaven while living here. He called the story “So Far, So Good” at the time. OK, so Hope of Heaven wasn’t very good…but he finished it.