do you think of the East? Sundeen: I lived in Brooklyn for a year or two. I teach at a low-res in New Hampshire, but I like the West, the architecture, the wide openness. I like the conversations in the East, but it comes with a self-importance, like “we are the center of the world.” Especially in publishing. Life out here is as equally interesting and it can be frustrating. BMR: Speaking of publishing, when I picked up a copy of Car Camping, you were blurbed by George Saunders and Hubert Selby Jr. Anthony Bourdain wrote the review in The New York Times. How did you get that coverage? What was the process of publishing your first book? Sundeen: I was a graduate student at USC in LA. I came to the program with a lot of these chapters already written, self-published. I took a class with Hubert Selby and I ended up selling the book to a publisher when I was still in school. It came out the next year. I was like 28. George Saunders was kind of a slightly unknown back then. I was working in Mexico, and we had just pulled in to a trailer park and I checked my email,—they must have had a computer—and I got this great blurb. I had never heard of him. BMR: Amazing. Sundeen: 1999. BMR: And the review? The review told more about Bourdain than the book. Sundeen: It was a horrible review. I’ve held a grudge for 20 years now. It was a weird thing. It came out in paperback, not a large print run, a first-time author who had never published anywhere…it was a takedown review as if I were someone who needed to be taken down. But that was before he was famous. Kitchen Confidential had not come out yet. BMR: What was the process for the second book? The Making of Toro… Sundeen: My agent went out to lunch with an editor from Lyons Press and they cooked up a scheme. I was gonna go to Mexico and do a similar book to Car Camping, but about bullfighting. I’d never been to a bullfight. I had zero interest in bullfighting. I found the whole idea repulsive and derivative. The idea was so starkly a “wannabe Hemingway,” but I needed the money. So I took the contract. Before I even went to Mexico, though, I decided I wasn’t going to write the book I was contracted to do. I wrote a mate—a making of… and I just made fun of the book I was supposed to write. Of course, they didn’t want to publish it, so we had to give them the money back. It wasn’t very much, like $4000. Then we sold it to Simon & Schuster. It worked out well. BMR: Then how many years before The Man Who Quit Money…? Sundeen: A long time, I want to say nine years. BMR: There seems to be a stylistic, shall I say, philosophical shift…
27 | Issue 36