A conversation with Anthony Swofford

on June 24, 2012 at 7:45 AM
Swofford_HHJ_AuthorPhotoCREDIT-Christa Parravani.JPGAnthony Swofford

In 2003, Anthony Swofford published “Jarhead,” his searing memoir of being a Marine sniper during the Gulf War in 1991. The book was a literary examination of the meaning of combat and Swofford’s own tortured past.

“Jarhead” brought Swofford fame and wealth, copious amounts of alcohol, many women and some drugs. In his new book “Hotels, Hospitals and Jails” (Twelve, 278 pp., $26.99), Swofford explores his meteoric rise in the literary community and his sharp, almost fatal fall. Swofford even takes on a tree with a sports car. He frames this memoir with three RV trips across the country with his father John Howard Swofford, an ex-military man, abusive dad, hard drinker and womanizer, now terminally ill with emphysema. The trips are both comic and brutal, as father and son try to find some redemption. At the end of the book, Swofford meets a female artist. They find love and have a baby, and Swofford discovers some unexpected hope.

Swofford, 41, spoke by telephone with freelance writer Dylan Foley from San Francisco.

Q. Why did you decide to write this raw memoir now?

A. I was searching for a book. The Iraq War novel I was trying to write stalled, my life stalled it. I took the first RV trip with my father in April 2009. I got home to New York. I decided to write a follow up to “Jarhead,” life after war, which I hadn’t seen articulated, at least from a guy from my war.

Q. You had a brutal relationship with your father. How did this affect your adult life?

A. I was afraid of being a father because of the example I had. I knew I was a different man, but I came from that man. If I waited for my father to die before I had a child, I thought I could break the cycle. Writing the book became another way to break the cycle. If I wrote these things about my father, I could exorcise them and encapsulate the narrative in a book that would become a physical thing, free of myself. My father had had a very Southern Gothic upbringing.

When I took him to task on how he raised us, he’d say, “You had it easy compared to me.”

Q. Your father was a Vietnam vet. Where do you think his womanizing and drinking came from?

A. I think it was partially a badge of his era and a reaction to what is very boring when you are home from war, which is a life with a wife, two children and one on the way. He drove fast cars, drank and womanized because he was after the contact high of combat and the possibility of dying. You can’t replicate it, but a lot of men try.

Q. Why do you think you indulged in self-destructive behavior after “Jarhead”?

A. I was having fun and my head was in the sand. Part of it might have been guilt over success and not necessarily believing that I deserved it.

Q. In the middle of the book, you visit the Bethesda Naval Hospital, meeting with horribly injured young Marines. Why?

A. I want this to be read as a chastisement of myself and what I was doing. My ennui and whatever troubles I had were minor compared to what I saw on the hospital floor. The mothers of the wounded vets still haunt me.

Q. At the birth of your daughter Josephine, did you see the chance that you could be a better man than your father?

A. I don’t think my father ever thought about being a father, or thought about his behavior. He’s not an introspective guy. Josephine has brought clarity and focus to my life, and freedom from some anxieties and burdens. Even the burden of writing doesn’t matter. I will write other books, but what I do with this life, Josephine’s, is most important.