Words that kill demons
Within the first few pages the 35-year-old author has ‘puked for a little while’ in an alley behind his office after a drunken lunch and masturbated in the office toilet. Book clubs that like cosy, feelgood reads will already be crossing it off the list, which is a pity because it is an honest, deeply serious and often funny read.
Beneath the chaotic lifestyle lies a serious concern with the current state of literary writing, where originality is rejected in favour of what the author calls ‘bad writing’. Baxter moved to Dublin from Louisiana in 2003, ‘a resentful and jealous and desperate would-be writer’, disillusioned by his failure to find a publisher for his first novel, an ambitious-sounding work. After some months of unemployment he was taken on as a journalist on a weekly medical newspaper. A failed marriage left him with the mortgage on a €500,000 house on an estate in north Dublin, bought at the height of the boom.
