Returned writer finds satisfaction in overalls, manners and 'madness'
by Jack Neely
There wasn't any available table seating at Fountain City's most venerable restaurant at noon on Tuesday. There was only the lunch counter in the back, but long-legged Allison Glock seemed perfectly happy with the perch. When she took her stool among strangers, it seemed like the best seat in the house.
Her dark brown hair perpetually tousled, and a frontal I-dare-you challenge in her light-brown eyes, she looks like a heroine of a girls' adventure book. She would make a good subject for one. She is, at 35, a successful magazine writer on a national scale, in the masthead of GQ as a Contributing Writer. She's no longer that monthly's sex columnist, a role she served for half a decade, but her distinctively personal profiles of Hollywood and sports celebrities are often hailed on the cover: David Duchovny, Sofia Coppola, most recently writer/actor/performance artist Spalding Gray. She is also a regular contributor to ESPN's print magazine: her profile of Diamondbacks pitcher Randy Johnson, in fact, is the only story by a female writer that journal has ever featured on its cover.
This year, Knopf published her first book, Beauty Before Comfort, which has earned sometimes-ecstatic critical raves from all the big papers, as well as from major writers like Frank McCourt and Ann Beattie. She has spent most of the last decade living in New York. She went to last year's Grammy Awards with hip-hop star Missy Elliott. Just in the past couple of weeks, she has spent quality time with Drew Barrymore, Lord of the Rings heartthrob Orlando Bloom, and Kansas City quarterback Trent Green.
Why she seems so much at home here at the back counter at Litton's calls for some explaining.
"Knoxville's kind of an evocative place," she says. "I liked the way I felt here." Knoxville's not her home, at least not in the childhood or ancestral sense. Glock spent her early childhood in small-town West Virginia, and grew up in Jacksonville, Fla. Her experience as Knoxvillian is limited to three years in the early '90s, when the J-school grad was a bottom-rung editor at the loony magazine-and-video company Whittle Communications. (She was probably that doomed company's final editorial hire.) She outlasted Whittle and stayed on to work as a Jazzercise instructor at the downtown Y and, occasionally, as a freelancer for Metro Pulse (her personal profile of an edgy Johnny Majors turned out to be one of that coach's last).
This fall's move back to Knoxville was a big surprise to her friends and colleagues. You get the feeling she likes to startle people, especially herself.
"I wanted to go back to the place I felt happiest," she says. "You'd think going to New York and having this successful life would be enough. But this felt better to me."
She lived in various parts of town back then, but she got to know Litton's, her favorite restaurant in Knoxville. You can't help but wonder if maybe it's the reason she has moved her family of four into a bungalow just around the corner, and maybe part of the reason that she has moved back to Knoxville. She orders the hamburger with pepper jack cheese and a sweet iced tea.
She likes the burgers, but there's something more than that. "What I like about it is that it's an old building that's been here forever," she says. She points to a lean guy in a striped shirt at the grill. "That guy," she says. "That guy worked here 10 years ago. I like that he's still there."
That sense of permanence is part of the reason she's here. "Everything's so transitory in New York," she says.
She's not sure her husband, Australian book designer Nick Law, who works as creative director for a large New York design firm, shares her impressions. Their two small children, Matilda Mercy and Dixie Jean, attend a local day care. For now, they're all being good sports about it. They made the move look permanent when they bought, sight unseen, an early 20th-century bungalow. For the last couple of months they have been at work fixing the place up.
"When we first got here, we went downtown to eat," she recalls. "We pulled into town, stepped out of the car, and the first thing we see is a street preacher. Which is great." They walked into the now-defunct café Papa John's on Wall Avenue.
"I was hyperventilating, I was so thrilled," she says. She ordered grilled cheese and sweet tea and eavesdropped on people talking unselfconsciously around the horseshoe-shaped counter. "It's nice to hear accents again, a language I understand," she says. "And it's nice to be free from irony. In the city, there's a reflexive fear of earnestness and commitment. You have to be winking at everything. It's exhausting."
With any ambitious writer, everything is material. As it happens, she's working on a second book, this one about her inspiration to move to Knoxville. "I have a vague premise: the power of place, and how that changes you and your life. Whether it can trump certain other inclinations. I have the title for it: Tourist. I have the setting. I just need the plot."
It's not coming quite as quickly as the plot of her surprising first book, this year's Beauty Before Comfort. The book is an intimate biography of Aneita Jean Blair of Hancock County, W. Va.: the sexiest woman in a prewar pottery town on the Ohio River, a merciless lover of a string of unsuspecting men, and Allison Glock's grandmother. Because her father wasn't around, Glock spent a lot of childhood in the tutelage of her grandmother, who enjoyed poring over an album of black-and-white photos, dominated by her former lovers. The album became the basis of the book, which is a surprisingly detailed and frank picture of a reckless adolescence in a trying situation.
"My grandmother was a larger-than-life character in a real dismal place," says Glock. "Her presence was enough to make the whole place magical to me."
She's careful not to sentimentalize her grandmother as a cookies-in-the-oven type. "She was a narcissistic personality," Glock says frankly, "not always a lot of fun."
The minute detail of a world Glock is too young to remember is sometimes astonishing. "I was really lucky," she explains. "I had this scrapbook and probably looked at these photos a million times. If you look at a photograph long enough, it can come to life, it really can." She also had the advantage of a witness whom she interviewed at length before her grandmother's death in 2002.
Glock found that her grandmother's memory was selective. "Some things she willfully forgot," Glock says. "The boys she certainly remembered."
She has no apologies for telling what she believes is the truth. "As a writer, you're basically a parasite," she says. She admits her own mother has not spoken to her about the book, and most of the story's principal characters are dead, but she's gotten no complaints yet. "I was devoted to making sure it was right," she says. "And I didn't want to make fun of people's lives, or of their industry."
As for her grandmother, she says, "When you describe a narcissist, it doesn't matter what you say." They just like to be talked about.
The book has gotten raves from most of the major literary journals: the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Publisher's Weekly, several of them quoting one line never before seen in the history of literature: "puberty hit my grandmother like a dropped piano." Kirkus called it a "lovely, blue memoir...pulsing, fetching, leaving a strong afterglow." Frank McCourt, author of another memoir, Angela's Ashes, wrote that Glock "packs worlds into sentences... What a storyteller! What a book!" He suggests that readers will finish the 187-page book in one sitting.
The only negative review in a big paper, she says, came from Pittsburgh, the city nearest to the book's setting, and it still sticks in Glock's craw. The Post-Gazette's reviewer critiqued the book on feminist grounds. "To say it wasn't feminist is stupid," Glock says. "My grandmother made her own choices. She should be able to do what she wants, employ her gifts as she chooses."
Even after all the extravagant praise for her rare story of small-town sexuality, Glock is best known as a sportswriter. "I love sports: the drama of it's just so perfect. It's drama you can't find anywhere else."
It came naturally. "I'm your basic jock," she says. In youth she played all the basic competitive ball games, basketball, volleyball, tennis. Later she took up competitive mountain biking. She's been doing a lot of running lately, and a new sport that she calls "street fighting." She says kickboxing is, by comparison, a sissy thing.
Street fighting is a hardly-any-holds-barred martial art she learned from a Northern European immigrant who used to make his living robbing people. She met him in a New York gym. "He taught me how to hurt people," she says. "He taught me things he learned when he was stealing jewelry and purses. So if this writing thing doesn't work out, I'm all set."
"He taught me surprise. As a woman, I'm never going to be stronger than a man," she says, but she seems modest. She could take out most of the guys eating lunch in Litton's today, including this one.
"It works to my advantage to be a girl sportswriter," she says. "If you're a man, you have to know the statistics. I don't have to do any of that. They don't expect me to know jack about baseball. And I don't." What she finds are insights into character; for her ESPN cover, for example, she was allowed a rare interview with Randy Johnson's wife, which rounded out his story in a new way.
She has another advantage in that she's just a fine writer with a facility for startling adjectives and analogies, often with anatomical detail.
She admits, "I'm real into physicality." She's struck by the apparent fact that New Yorkers are generally better-looking than Knoxvillians. "But I like the way people look here. They're not pretending to be anything they're not. There's not a lot of energy spent in presenting yourself in a certain way. It's different from New York, where most of your energy is invested in that."
She says most of the words come to her on the spot. "Sometimes scenes are just perfect and great, and it seems easy."
"Writing is what I always wanted to do. Now it's the only thing I can do. I'm not particularly great at anything else."
But writing's also a venue for an adventurous personality. That occurred to her as she was interviewing an Australian rodeo rider in the pit, in Las Vegas. "When will I be able to see these things?" she asks. "It's only because I have this job."
Today, just as soon as she finishes her burger and tea and maybe some dessert, Allison Glock is off to Seattle to interview NBA superstar Rashard Lewis. Her flight leaves in about an hour, McGhee Tyson is 20 miles away from here, and she's just assuming her cab will be on time. But she's taking her time with her hamburger. "Knoxville's the smallest airport in the world," she says. "What do I have to be, 20 minutes early?"
And once again, she's off. Like all her assignments, it will be over, and she'll be back in Knoxville, a city she purports to love. She ticks off several of the reasons why she likes this place. "Men in overalls. Women in makeup. The soft profile of the mountains and how from a distance they look like a mirage. The Pray for Righteous Government billboards. Good manners. The ease people have with each other. The sweet tea. Seeing people walk along the side of the road. Seeing people who don't have perfect teeth. Not having to pick up your dog's shit with a baggie."
Some of her reasons seem a little provisional. One might easily go through a day in Knoxville without encountering much in the way of overalls or good manners—and there's a strong will among some to enforce poop scooping. But one of Allison Glock's characteristics of Knoxville sounds distinct, familiar, and understandable:
"The acceptance and embrace of lunacy and the expectation that at some point every person goes a little mad."
December 11, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 50
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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