What does an actor who stars in the upcoming prequel to Planet of the Apes, Rise of the Apes, who has a slew of awards—five Emmys, two Tonys, and two Golden Globes—and who has published eight bestselling children’s picture books do in his spare time? In the case of actor John Lithgow, he writes a memoir, Drama: An Actor’s Education (HarperCollins, Oct.), his first book for adults. Or, as he prefers to describe it, he takes his “first stab at a book that weighs more than three ounces.”
Although Drama grew out of Lithgow’s one-man show, Stories by Heart, both came from the same intense experience: trying to find a way to reach his very ill father, actor and director Arthur Lithgow, by reading him a childhood favorite, P.G. Wodehouse’s “Uncle Fred Flits By.” “I’m convinced,” writes Lithgow in his own foreword, “that it was sometime during the telling of that story that my father came back to life.” It also awakened something in Lithgow: a desire to tell the story of his unconventional childhood, moving around the country in the wake of his father’s theatrical pursuits.
Since Lithgow views theater as spinning stories, he approached the book as “nonfiction storytelling.” For him, writing the first half was hard. “I hadn’t quite discovered what it was yet. I had no faith in myself. As soon as it dawned on me that it should end in 1980, and I didn’t have to write about [the last] 30 years, it became easier. If you think of my life as a play, I stop at an intermission. One of the last things that happened was subtitling it ‘An Actor’s Education.’ It’s about how I learned who I was as a person and learned my craft.” Age 35 formed a natural break, because it was then that Lithgow met the woman who was to become his second wife, and he was about to achieve celebrity with two Oscar nominations in back-to-back years for The World According to Garp and Terms of Endearment.
During the three years Lithgow worked on the memoir, he put his children’s book writing on hold. “This was an all-consuming project,” but he does hint at a project that he’s considering next. After completing Drama, he’s willing to reconsider writing a YA novel, something that he felt defeated by when his publisher asked him to some years back. “I’m a hobbyist,” he says describing his writing. “I’m not going to go up against Philip Roth or John Updike.”
In his second BEA appearance, Lithgow will appear on one of the Author stages today at 1:30. He spoke about Micawber (Simon & Schuster), illus. by C.F. Payne, at the Children’s Breakfast in 2002.
