It’s true that I only have a general sketch of McCarthy’s life, but I was well aware that all of his marriages were horrible failures and that he was penniless for much of his life until 1992 when All The Pretty Horses was a hit just in time for him to turn 60. The well known anecdote about how some guy showed up at his doorstep in 1981 (or whenever it was) to give him the “genius grant” is a classic for sure.

However, a few months back we had the revelation that he snuck a teenage girl over the border in 1976 (argh), and from this article I’m finding out that he had to work jobs as a garbageman in New Orleans (gee, guess he missed Alex Chilton and Ray Davies by a few years, eh?) and got the crap beaten out of him by his father, so this article indicates there’s still obviously plenty of details to fill in with his life that I wouldn’t have learned from Rolling Stone articles and book reviews, a bit like how A Man Called Destruction filled out Alex Chilton’s life to a strong degree.

Still, of all the sad details of McCarthy’s personal life, that he apparently spent his final days collecting cars and apparently being really depressed is sort of the saddest, a bit reminiscent of David Lynch not being able to cross his own room because of his emphysema, while fires burnt Los Angeles to the ground.

Uhm…Child Of God was his first good book, even if it’s no masterpiece. I’ve never heard anyone trash it so badly as calling it “one of the most laughably bad books ever written.” “I agree that his first two Southern Gothic books, from the 1960s, aren’t very good (though the worst thing he ever wrote was the screenplay for The Counselor, which came out when he was 80) and yes, he was very derivative of Faulkner, but for God’s sake, try reading some of his better books, dude. TonyV said he “couldn’t believe how bad” McCarthy was on the basis of hearing someone read a couple of paragraphs of his work–this isn’t Left Behind, guys. READ HIS BETTER BOOKS. Including Suttree, which is still modern Southern Gothic but one of the best “guy wandering around wasting his life” books ever written, mostly because it mixes humor and pathos beautifully.