Mentor: A Memoir

A grim look back at a writer’s journey from publication to crippling self-doubt prompts Grimes (Redemption Song), the director of Texas State University M.F.A. program, to reflect deeply on his literary mentor, Frank Conroy. In 1989 Grimes, then a married 32-year-old waiter in Key West, Fla., with a few published short stories under his belt and a lot of ambition, was accepted into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop on a top scholarship at the instigation of director Conroy (famous for an early memoir, Stop-Time), who anointed Grimes—on the strength of an unfinished baseball novel—as the next golden boy with unlimited promise. Grimes was both "electrified by hope" and paralyzed by anxiety during his stint in Iowa struggling to finish the novel; on Conroy’s recommendation, Grimes signed with agent Eric Ashworth and soon had five offers by publishers, though none of them terribly enthusiastic or high paying. Pressured to make a quick decision, Grimes chose badly, he later believed, underscored by the subsequent critical failure of the novel, Season’s End. "All Frank had hoped for had not come to pass," writes Grimes in defeat, and though their friendship endured until Conroy’s death in 2005 ("I arrived fatherless; I departed a son"), Grimes never quite recovered from his overreaching ambition. Employing a constant tension of ambivalence—shame and tenderness, pride and humility—Grimes proves in this stunningly forthright, forlorn memoir that his great subject is Conroy himself. (Aug.)