Writer David Eddie on books, booze, memory and regrets (hoo diggity, he's had a few)

"I wish an editor had said to me earlier: 'Believe in yourself, don't be haunted by self-doubt, it’s not ONLY about you, you’re a vessel, someone might really be helped by the shit you have to say."

(photos: Daniel Ehrenworth for Toronto Life)

Last month I reconnected with my old friend Dave Eddie after several years when he and his wife Pam (a former CityTV New anchor) turned up at the Toronto launch of my book. I hadn’t expected them to make the trek down to the city and it was delighted as I hadn’t seen them properly since the fall of 2015 when a gang of us enjoyed a lost weekend on Kamalame Cay, a private island resort in the Bahamas where we partied like teenagers by night and swam off our hangovers by day, feasting on lobster and crab dip like the sun-blistered, sarong-draped court of Henry VIII.

Since then the world has become unrecognisable, along with our respective lives, for better and worse. Dave and I used to write popular newspaper columns in the lifestyle section of the same paper from which we were sacked along with pretty much every other jobbing freelancer in the English speaking world. I had a second baby. Dave and Pam sold up and absconded to the country during lockdown. I freaked out and absconded to rural Wales and wrote a book. Dave had a bit of a breakdown. I had a bit of a breakdown… anyhoo.

Dave and I kept in touch a bit on email over the years, joking wryly about the bizarro twists and turns of our day-to-day lives, but there are some old friends you need to see in person in order to properly connect. Before I moved to London I lived near Trinity Bellwoods park, just across from Dave and Pam’s creaky old yellow Victorian. In the naughties I spent countless nights on their big front porch drinking plonk with Pam and sneaking ciggies out of view of the front window for fear of being reprimanded by one of their three clean-living teenage sons. We talked to the wee hours about writing and books and movies and people and politics and relationships but mostly Dave did what he does best which is entertain his friends with long funny self-deprecating stories and insights peculiar tragicomedy of the human condition, his chosen field of decidedly non-academic study. He’s the kind of guy who repeats himself a lot but is also so agonisingly hilarious no one actually minds.

Dave’s the author of a lauded comic novel, Chump Change (1996), a heart-squelching memoir Housebroken: Confessions of a Stay-at-home-dad (1999) and Damage Control (2010), a book based on his long-running popular advice column in which he dispenses tidbits of off-beat wisdom and counsel without ever resorting to smugness or high-handed moral authority (thank Christ).

Late last year Dave published a brilliant viral personal essay in Toronto Life magazine about his ambivalence about country life after he and Pam sold up and moved to the beautiful back end of beyond (Grey County, Ontario) — the kind of essay both your hipster nephew and your Dad send you a link to in the same week, subject line: Hilarious! He’s now hard at work on a forthcoming comic memoir about his recovery from alcohol addiction and how his life was saved by a passionate and unexpected late-mid-life love affair with a rider lawn mower.

Our conversation was fascinating, loopy, revealing, insightful and ball-achingly funny. Just like Dave himself.

I’ll let him take it from here.

LM: You've written fiction and memoir -- for you, what's the big difference?

Listen, everything for me is a form of autobiography. I started out writing autobiographical book reviews, if you can feature that (for The Idler, a tiny magazine). My first novel was pretty thinly veiled fiction. I do think there is a great freedom in calling something “fiction.” My favourite writer a Russian named Edward Limonov. He called his books (It’s Me, Eddie and His Butler’s Story, among others) “fictional memoirs.” Simple! Think how much grief that would’ve saved, say, James Frey (and Oprah) among others. To me, reality is something we either imagine remembering and/or remember imagining (that line needs some R&D: I’m trying to be so aphoristic but it needs a little tweaking). In your book, you have your author’s note kind of about that. Like: “Hey, I did my best. Not everyone will remember stuff the way I did.”Etc. Something we all wrestle with.

For me, the incredible thing is addiction memoirs. Like Michael Pond’s Wasted: An Alcoholic Therapist’s Fight for Recovery in A Flawed System. He seems to have an almost eidetic memory for people, places, what the weather was like, what he was thinking, what he was wearing, what the policeman was wearing when he was fingerprinted, the expression on the policeman’s face, etc—all while he, Michael Pond, was staggering around drunk, living with crack whores, in and out of shelters, hospitals, dumpster diving, sleeping rough, etc and so on and so forth. How does he remember it all? The publicity bumf around his book intones: “These things really happened. As much as possible we’ve corroborated his recollection of events with those who were also there. Several people have remarked on Mike’s uncanny ability to recall precise details.”

Hoo diggity, is that ever not true of moi. Moi is more like Michel de Montaigne, 16th French century essayist, who says in an essay: “There is no man so unsuited for the task of speaking about memory as I am, for I find scarcely a trace of it in myself, and I do not believe there is another man in the world so hideously lacking in it. All my other faculties are poor and ordinary, but in this I feel I am most rare and singular, and deserve to gain name and fame thereby.” You see what he’s saying there? He’s ordinary in other respects, but he should be famous for how lousy his memory is. Moi aussi! Uh-oh I’m droning here a bit—I’ll wrap it up in a sec—but add booze and fuhgeddaboudit—literally. I’m the king of—Me: “Oh, hi, nice to meet you.” My interlocutor: “Unbelievable, Dave, I drove you to that parenting panel last month, remember?” One interesting book, by the way, is Night of the Gun, where a New York Times reporter goes back to report all the stuff that he got up to drunk. Nothing is the way he remembers it (e.g. “the time my friend pulled a gun on me”: it was him who pulled the gun on the friend.

2. Your voice is incredibly distinctive -- honest, self-deprecating, insightful, clever, funny and full of heart. How did it develop and change over the years?

Uh, thanks but now that’s a lot of pressure to be all those things in these answers. Ands this will sound really dumb and fake but I AM still learning—that’s not the dumb, fake part. The dumb fake-sounding part is I had a great editor last year, for a magazine article I did, I think maybe best editor I’ve had, and I killed myself to do this thing, something most people might toss off in an afternoon, staying up all night, etc. First two cracks he said: “Nope sorry, swing and miss. Delete and start over.” O.K. here’s the corny part. He said three things with me: 1) Don’t try to be funny, 2) Don’t show off, 3) Remember, you’re a vessel. I know that last part sounds corny, but it really helped me. Meaning: other people might have gone through something similar just remember that. It’s not all about you. Writing this addiction memoir—well, it’s the first one that might really help someone, I think. “The alcoholic who still suffers,” as they say in AA. And it is a form of suffering. Its just a weird type of suffering because the person doing the suffering often thinks he/she/they is having a great time.

My third book, Damage Control: How to Tiptoe Away From the Smoking Wreckage of Your Latest Screw-up With a Minimum of Harm to Your Reputation actually made it into the self-help section of bookstores. But I always felt guilty some poor soul at the end of his/her/their rope grabbing it and going WTF (as the subtitle hints, it was “for entertainment purposes only” and mainly jokey, though I obviously tried to provide as good advice as I could). This one I think might help anyone who’s been through it, or teetering on the edge, etc.

Your book, too, I can see helping people with issues with family (pretty much everyone, right?). In fact, I bet it’s doing just that. God. I got so many questions from people with family issues writing the column. And as I’ve learned from AA re: addiction, the best therapy is someone who says “Hey, I’ve been there. I’ve been you.” The first way I tried to get sober was at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health: I asked the 28-year-old counselor: “What’s your relationship to alcohol yourself. Like a little wine with dinner, hmmm?” Him: “I don’t think its appropriate for me to answer that question.” Thanks a lot, bupkes. In AA everyone has been there...

3. You wrote your well-loved advice column Damage Control for almost as long as I wrote a column... What's post-columnising life like? Has it helped or hindered your writing? How has it changed your rhythm and process not having that weekly deadline?

Leah, it wasn’t my choice, I got the chop, but you know what, it was a largely autobiographical column written for 15 years by a man to whom next to nothing happens. I rarely leave the house. I like it that way. “A life of quiet contemplation” is how I put it to myself. Jon Krakauer can freeze his ass off on Everest, call in a panic on a satellite phone, “Help, help send a chopper were all gonna die” then swing into a New York dinner party on a chandelier. See, he can have all that. But anyway my point is I think I was probably a little bit tapped out of anecdotes. Basically, my day: wake up, drink coffee,¹ type, make sandwich, type, press send... I mean, somebody might give me a funny look on the bus, or I might try a different kind of mustard on my sandwich, but otherwise I was starting to run out of stories...

4. You sold up and moved the country (will include link to brilliant TO Life piece obvs), how has it changed your writing and your life?

You know Leah, that T-dot Life piece was a bit of a lie, as Pam was saying to me the other day. Malcolm as part of his whole “you are a vessel” thing was all like “we’ve heard a lot from people who moved to the country and loved, what about people who moved to the country and are full of regrets.” So he noodged it in that direction. I mean, regrets, I had a few, e.g. friends and dim sum and biking everywhere, but we honestly love the open spaces. And every time I go back now to the city I’m like: construction, traffic, give me back the wide open spaces. Funny cuz I used to live in New York, and when I came back to T-dot I was like: what a quaint little burgh.

Now I just love all the green & open spaces. Naughty oh-so-superior urban friends: “Hey Dave what do you do all the time up there, anyway? Watch the corn grow?” Har-de-har-har snicker chuckle chortle... Me: “Hey, man, corn grows faster than you think. Watching it grow is fun.”

My rural ripostes might need a bit of work... Anyway, writing is about the same-ish

5. Tell me about your new memoir -- it's about addiction and recovery, a category of its own when it comes to memoir. What are you trying to say in telling it and how is it different from your previous work? Also, why do you think the addiction-recovery story is such an endlessly compelling personal narrative (even for readers who might not struggle with addiction)?

Oh, shoot, I went ahead and answered this already. Might actually help people, etc. For me, what’s interesting is the fucking way it sneaks up on you. The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous (basically the bible of that organization) says: “Remember it is alcohol we are dealing with—cunning, baffling, powerful!” I would add my mother-in-law’s adjective: “Insidious.” And my own (not that either of these are original, I’ve heard them both a million times in meetings): “Patient.” Non-metaphorical snakes are never both poisonous and constrictors, in my understanding. But alcohol bit me in the ass, then wrapped its coils around me, trying to squeeze the life out of me. I didn’t see it coming! Until age 58...

6. What do you wish a senior writer had told you about first person writing back when you were starting out?

“Believe in yourself, stop being so haunted by self-doubt, remember it’s not ONLY about you, you’re a vessel, someone might really be helped by the shit you have to say.” Also, let it flow naturally. Like Eddie Murphy says to the LA cop in Beverly Hills Cop:

“It should be more natural, brother. It should flow out. Like this: ‘Look, man, I ain’t falling for no banana in the tailpipe.’”

Yeah, that would’ve been good advice to a young writer. For first drafts.

7. You've written for TV and film as well -- how does that world differ from the world of books and columns?

More social! We kibitz around, posting up cards on corkboards, laughing and laughing. Versus the terrible ham-sandwich existence of a prose writer. And the checks? Ye gods, I remember once getting a check from my TV agent and the Globe on the same day, thinking: “Holy shit, I been in the wrong business too long.” But ultimately I like prose better, I think.

8. How do you balance emotional veracity with humour? Do you have a tone you aim for and if so, what is it and how?

It’s better, I think, not to try to be funny. Let it comes naturally.

9. Your previous memoir Housebroken was about being a somewhat reluctant stay-home Dad -- it felt like a very taboo subject at the time. Do you think that's changed in the decades since?

Didn’t feel too taboo to me at the time. Downtown Toronto, that is. On a typical Wednesday I would say there were an equal number of nannies, grannies, mommies, and mannies in the park. But there’s always been a reluctance on the part of men and I think always will be. I remember a stockbroker saying to me once: “Yeah, I’d do that, for a year.” The implication being: a) anyone could do it; b) obviously, the world couldn’t spare him for a year. So be it. I did it and I’m happy. I got to spend a lot of time with my kids when they were little.

10. You've written about your family a lot in fairly revealing ways. What impact has your work had on your relationships, with your family and friends and how did you manage the fall out (if any)?

Leah, it’s impossible to be an autobiographical writer without stepping on toes. I try not to, but someone always gets pissed. Random example: in a column I said about my best friend’s marriage it probably wasn’t meant to be. (It only lasted a few months.) His wife took it the wrong way (I didn’t mean that she was bad, just that they were bad for one another.) So did her brother, who phoned me in the Dominican Republic to say “I’m not a violent man but if I were I’d punch you in the nose.” I try to avoid it, but it can be tough. It’s a tightrope walk.

11. Have there been major life events over the years that you've chosen to exclude from your work? If so, are you willing to share them (if not, that's fine!). Why did you make the decision to leave certain things out?

Um, yes. That’s the long answer. Short answer is yes. I don’t know if I’m willing to write about it, yet. Pam wants me to. Let’s just say it concerns a painful moment in our marriage. I’ll have to get back to you on that.

12. We've talked a lot about honesty in personal writing -- how honest can/should a memoirist be? Conversely how much of the craft is narrative construct? (I don't mean in terms of making things up but in the sense that memoirs are ultimately stories and need shaping.)

Well, I personally wrestle with it mightily. As an alcoholic I lied to everyone. I turned my house into a House of Lies. I turned my doctor’s office into an Office of Lies. Etc. But now I’m trying to make up for it.

13. Who are your major memoir influences (fiction or non)?

The above-mentioned Edward Limonov is my favourite writer. I hate to mention Martin Amis because his work is so uneven, if you pick up the wrong thing people say “What is Dave talking about.”

14. What does Pam think of all this?

Pam is so used to me writing about her it’s not even a thing anymore.

1. Later, booze.