A Long Way From Kind And Pretty

by Timber Masterson

Original working title :
" Every Kitten Starts Off Soft and Good. "
Before that it was
" The Charming Imposter."
We've hung with the 'Timfoolery, Tales of a Third Rate Junkie' title for quite a while.
Though it is now the consensus of the offices here, that a drug reference may scare off
agents and prospective publishers, so, we're going with a more conservative,
yet just as full-on, kick-ass, properly heartbreaking,
"A Long Way From Kind And Pretty."
It's the best one.

A Description of the Writing Project

"A Long Way From Kind And Pretty" is a work of creative non-fiction based on the last ten years of a young man's life: his days as an aspiring actor in Toronto, supporting his art by throwing after hours parties; moonlighting as a limo driver for a gangster in New York; time as a heartbroken junkie in Vancouver, to eviction from a California rehab center on Christmas eve and finally, the return of the broken prodigal to a childhood home in Canada and an estranged mother battling with her own demons. The story chronicles his fight with drug addiction, bi polar mania, all underwritten by the loss of his father as a teenager.

Part Odyssey, part Fear and Loathing, this is a modern day journey into the heart of darkness of heroin addiction. It's a Gen-X coming-of-age tale while shaking it rough on the mean streets. Spurning the usual gloom and doom of the addiction-recovery genre, this book vibrates with a manic and surreal energy and a truly remarkable facility with language, pushing it into the realm of narrative's most extreme and playful possibilities, a phantasmagoria of layered symbolism and imagery in the production of a truly unique vision somewhere this side of reality.

The book tells the story of a decade that embraces the ennui of being broke and homeless in Los Angeles, jetting in and out of clinics and treatment centers, shelters, and AA meetings. This 'Outsider' is at odds with dealers, doctors with agendas, priests handing out redemption, creepy casting directors, and teachers with lessons too hard to learn. We encounter children at the door wanting only candy, getting more than they bargained for, enfeebled and enraged landlords, girlfriends turned escorts, rabbits that rescue and cats that speak up in their own defense. Masterson may have produced the first example of a magical realism rooted in North American popular culture, one in the tradition of Kubla Khan.

An addict with a life-saving charm, the protagonist pulls scams, crashes social events, impersonates employees - whatever it takes to impress, to ingratiate and to get the next fix. His refuge is the interior world of drug-induced fantasies poised on the precipice of a fall into real memory and the imminent loss and waste, which is the spectral accompaniment to the addled life of addiction. Filled with grandiose self-absorption, these meditations in the tradition of Coleridge unfold in a theatre of the absurd, forging a kind of William Burroughs situation comedy of club scene kids. All awaits the reckoning moments of sobriety and the exploration of the deep interior cavern of despair through the act of writing.

An only child, suddenly parentless, the protagonist's journey from painfully awkward youth to smarmy master of the social sleight of hand is a search for not only understanding and release but for like minds and available hearts, for a home that will hold. Ill equipped by the illusions and transitory comforts of popular culture, the narrator is trapped by his charm as well as his addiction and is left with only a commitment to creativity and art.

Writing with unforgiving insight and a reckless humour, Masterson transforms scenes normally fraught with ugliness into ones of painfully human beauty by bringing to them an almost crippling tenderness.

The narrator's voice has a ruthlessly comic sensitivity to the banal, the false and the absurd aligning this work with that of David Foster Wallace, Mark Leyner and David Sedaris. Fantastic and imaginative, the voice is nonetheless mature: unforgiving and mocking of both self and other.

* * *

"Masterson is a great and ridiculous writer. He has a singular voice, one that always shocks me and makes me laugh. It's shocking he's not a huge writer, won't be a surprise if he becomes one."
- James Frey, author of 'A Million Little Pieces' and 'My Friend Leonard'

* * *

Masterson's work will be appreciated by readers who have enjoyed the following comparable books on the market:

Dave Eggers - "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius"

Elizabeth Wurtzel - "More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction"

David Rakoff - "Fraud", "Don't Get Too Comfortable"

David Sedaris - "Me Talk Pretty One Day"

David Foster Wallace - "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", "Infinite Jest"

Mark Leyner - "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist", "Teatherball"

James Frey - "A Million Little Pieces", "My Friend Leonard"

Nick Flynn - "Another Bullshit Night In Suck City"

Douglas Coupland - "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture"

Richard Hell - "Go Now"

Heather O'Neill - "Lullabies for Little Criminals"

Bret Easton Ellis - "Less Than Zero" , "American Psycho"

Jay McInerney - "Bright Lights, Big City"

Robert Bingham - "Pure Slaughter Value"

Hunter S. Thompson - "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"

Denis Johnson - "Jesus' Son: Stories"

Mordecai Richler - "Barney's Version"

DBC Pierre - "Vernon God Little"

Augusten Burroughs - "Running With Scissors", "Dry"

Martin Amis - "Experience: A Memoir"

Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall - "Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shanty Town"

Dan Kennedy - "Loser Goes First: My Thirty-Something Years of Dumb Luck and Minor Humiliation"

Peter Hyman - "The Reluctant Metrosexual: Dispatches from an Almost Hip Life"

* * *

Travels with an Uneasy Observer Timber Masterson knows the power of a story well-told. His latest book, "A Long Way From Kind And Pretty", is an off-kilter antidote to an era overburdened by the snide and darkly ironic. Masterson is doing his fish-out-of-water thing. On this sweltering morning he is outfitted in a brown jacket over a navy T-shirt, dark slacks and black thick-soled boots-made not for scaling mountains but for prowling, clubbing and other vagaries of urban adventure. The current trek plops this Canadian-cum-New Yorker at the fringes of LA summer with a different purpose. This time, instead of gathering color and quotes for one of his wildly outrageous magazine stories, he's on another side of the Q&A – promoting his new book, "A Long Way From Kind And Pretty." Though seated outdoors, Timber politely removes his oval shades and squints against the ridiculousness of the over-bright sun. If he's incredulous that it's nearly 90 degrees and only 11:30 a.m., he hides it well, flipping the menu and ordering a Nicoise salad and tall iced coffee. He leans into business, a man-child used to acclimating quickly. Or attempting to will himself to. Whether over the radio, on a film set, on the page or across a narrow two-top beneath a fast-wilting ficus in a Pasadena restaurant, Masterson knows the incantatory power of a story well-told, the art of keeping words aloft like the bubbles in a champagne flute. He possesses the crackling wit of a '30's screwball comedy ingénue, a vocabulary that is a treasure chest of mots justes, impressive but most times not too showy for everyday wear. I thought it would be good, for the sake of novelty, to do something with Masterson besides just talk. I don't know, go shopping, take a walk. But after reading the work, all you want to do is talk to the guy. A Door Opening is a good way to put it; it's like he's written a key. That vast territory inside us stretches out - canyons, riverbeds sprout from the chemistry of closeness with other people. You want to pay attention to everything unspoken, and not necessarily act on it. The real struggle is in learning how to access the artistry inside of you. At one point, "Tales" (original name, "The Charming Impostor" he quips) was not words. It was not feelings. It was untranslatable. Here's what I love more than anything," he says. "It's not knowing what a thing is going to be. I found things writing this book, that I didn't know I knew. It's all in the voyage if you're willing to go along for it, and I was stunned by what I was able to dredge up. And in many ways it's still coming to me, it's still taking shape in my mind. You feel there's a lesson, but you just don't know what it is. Is it a portrait of lone liness? No. You see, when something is completely known, it's dead. There's a painting in the Tate, late 19th century," Masterson continues, "of a sick child with a doctor attending her and a distraught mother. Everything is totally clear. It didn't make it into the next century because it was so clear. It's the enigmatic ones, the ones you don't know quite what happens in them, those are the ones that last." "The story tracks the conscience of a generation starved for meaning, these tales of splendid wreckage, eerie and exact, full of wicked sub currents, a marvel of heavy thinking; you literally won't know what's hitting you. Strange lands made out of fragments of the familiar in a sixteen-car pileup of a novel..."