David Goodwillie's debut memoir is a witty and moving evocation of New York in the nineties. It follows a wide-eyed narrator with big dreams of literary stardom through one implausible job after another, including stints in minor league baseball, as a private investigator, and as an expert at Sotheby's. I met David Goodwillie at a French Bistro in the Meatpacking district on a blustery February day. He arrived a few minutes late, wearing his infamous "Where's Waldo" winter cap and an excessively long and colorful scarf that appeared to be tangled in the strap of his bag. After we settled in to some Eggs Benedict and coffee (a Bloody Mary for him), I began interrogating.

AW: I hate to bring this up because it has been talked into the ground, but I also feel that since we've both just written memoirs, it's a necessary topic for discussion. What are your feelings surrounding the whole James Frey explosion?

DG: I guess what bothered me most was the idea that memoirs were somehow tainted because of one guy. The truth is that with 99% of the memoirs out there, the writer, in the course of writing it, has been very careful with the truth. Certainly with my memoir I fact-checked everything as I went along, and I was really concerned because almost everyone in the book is still alive and many are good friends of mine. I wanted to get the characters and their essences exactly right, so I asked people if I remembered things correctly. I also let everyone in the book read an early version, and if they had issues I addressed them. I think Frey was a fairly isolated incident, and what he did shocked me. There were so many provable discrepancies -- these things are very easy to track if you bother to do it -- and just the nerve that he had. He must have been sitting in fear for two or three years just waiting to get caught. What a terrible way to live.

AW: A few weeks ago, I saw Michael Wolfe, the Vanity Fair editor, on Larry King, and it infuriated me to hear him blabbering on about how everyone knows that memoirs are fabrications of lives and that we created this genre because fiction is impossible to sell. Do you think this is true?

DG: That's bullshit. This is my first book, and I didn't know much about the publishing industry, but I was very clear on what a memoir was. I knew that I could obviously play with dialogue. I mean we don't walk around with a tape recorder but?

AW: But you could tell the difference between one hour and three months?

DG: Yes. Now, I did combine scenes a few times. There's a huge scene in Las Vegas at the end of the book when my friend loses $300,000, but I actually went to Vegas with him twice and meshed the two trips.

AW: Well, polishing the rough edges of a life is one thing.

DG: Yeah, as long as you say as much in a disclaimer, and this is where Frey got in trouble. I made it very clear how and why I changed things in the front of the book. It's just not that hard to do. Almost every memoir out there has a disclaimer, and I was shocked that his didn't. It's not all his fault either. His publisher was asleep at the switch. How did this book get out there without a disclaimer, especially with the ridiculous extremes this man went through? That they didn't fact check it at all was a bit strange. That said, when I handed my book in to Algonquin [Books], I assumed I'd be sitting down with a fact checker at some point but I never did. I guess publishing houses don't have people to do that, and it is up to the author to get things right.

AW: Well, I mean one would hope to trust the writer ? right?

DG: Yes.

AW: I think this is an isolated incident. Frey's just an asshole, and frankly I don't think he can write. Anyway, moving on. Do you think it's morally wrong to expose friends and family members in public the way a memoirist must?

DG: Yeah, I think the writer has a lot of power and you have to be careful how you use it. You can't go out there and malign somebody because you can. They don't get to tell their side of the story.

AW: Well, that's debatable. They could write a book too couldn't they?

DG: Well, yeah, I'm not too worried about that.

AW: Well, yours is fairly tame.

DG: Yeah, it's quite tame. The other side of that is that you can't write a completely bland book. You can't take out all the controversial things, and I certainly didn't do that. I mean there is some pretty heavy stuff in there, but it's a tight line, and one side of it is James Frey and other side is a boring book. And I know several other memoirists who write about difficult stuff, and they spent a lot of time trying to get it right.

AW: Yes, but getting it right doesn't necessarily mean not hurting someone. I mean I got my mother right, but the material is going to hurt her.

DG: No matter how you do it people are going to have different memories than you do. I mean, with my parent's divorce everyone in the family has a different opinion. I wrote it from a 14-year-old's viewpoint, a very wide-eyed, innocent viewpoint, and my take is naturally different from theirs, even now. But after the book was written we talked about it all, so in a way it was a bit of a therapeutic exercise.

AW: When I was reading the book, I felt a real honesty resonating from the pages, and I think this is something that memoirists struggle with, you know? How true are you, the writer, being to who you were at that time in your life? Do you feel like you were true to yourself?

DG: Yeah, I certainly feel like I was very innocent when I first moved to New York. And the book is a coming-of-age story about a wide-eyed kid moving to the city to follow a dream of becoming a writer, and it's not a very innocent city, and it certainly wasn't in the late 90's. I was very careful to make sure that I sort of took the blame for a lot of the stuff that happened because you can't make yourself into some kind of hero.

AW: Well, the reader has to like the narrator or they're not going to stick with the book.

DG: But you have to put your entire self out there, even the dark side, if you want the reader to trust you.

AW: I think people want a vulnerable narrator, a person with flaws and neuroses.

DG: Right, and I was vulnerable. I am vulnerable.

AW: Do you think that a memoir is a survival testimony?

DG: Mine is. I don't think all are. In a way, a lot of memoirs are about survival. You have to have a compelling story, and often that means addiction, a family crisis, a failed professional baseball career?

AW: Usually, something you had to overcome.

DG: Yeah, or attempting to overcome something and failing.

AW: Now, I've always thought that anyone who sits down to write a memoir must have an element of narcissism to their personality. Do you think so?

DG: A little bit. I sat down and said I kind of have an interesting story I want to tell, but I didn't have an enormous crisis. My parents didn't die within a month of each other and I didn't have to adopt my little brother.

AW: And you didn't have an affair with your father.

DG: No, I didn't. A lot of the stuff that most memoirs have mine doesn't, so I guess it comes down to the writing and the inner struggle to find oneself, and I think that is easily identifiable. Even though it's not some huge soap opera, I think people will identify with my book. Perhaps more so.

AW: On page 174, you say, "If only the memories meant more than the merchandise, but we do it to ourselves. Needing heroes, we give them too much and then watch them slowly strangle themselves with all the rope." I think this is an incredibly true statement, not only for the early and late nineties but also for our culture in general. We are constantly destroying people's lives, making them into famous figures at 16-years-old, the rock stars, the models, half of them die from drugs, the other half just fall off the face of the earth and end up on reality television shows for washed-up stars. Even writers -- poor Elizabeth Wurtzel, the media ate her up, and now she's quit writing entirely and she's at Yale law school and god knows. I hate to think about where Jonathan Safran Foer or Zadie Smith or Ben Kunkel will be in ten years. Fame destroys people. Talk to me about this?

DG: Setting is very important in a book, and my book is set in New York City in a cultural time that I find in a lot of ways shocking and difficult to live in without being constantly disgusted by what is going on around us. And we do do it to ourselves. It's like politics. A lot of times people are disgusted by it, but politicians are just reacting to a general public. We live in this time of instant gratification, of reality trumping fiction, whether it's reality television or blogs, and it's part of the reason memoirs are so popular. People want real grit. It's why the tabloids are so popular, and it's why we have Jessica Simpson, but even if it's all shit, even if all this reality is nothing, we are still fascinated by it, and I was fascinated by it and am fascinated by it. Again, there is a cultural clash between that and people who are trying to pursue art or something virtuous. This is clashing with the reality of our culture. I get embarrassed by it all the time. That quote is referring to baseball memorabilia, and even though I worked in that field for five years, including at the highest level at Sotheby's, I find it completely disgusting. I love it that a kid can collect baseball cards, That's great but?

AW: But the idea that people are willing to pay thousands or millions of dollars for a fucking object when people are starving to death in our country, when the entire continent of Africa is dying, is sickening.

DG: Yeah, at some point it becomes something else. When grown men are going to the ballpark and getting a guy to sign something a hundred times so they can resell it on Ebay. I went into that business thinking it was going to be this idealistic trot down our country's sporting history, and it quickly became something very different.

AW: At one point in the book you ask if commitment to anything more than oneself is a failed concept. I never really felt like you answered that.

DG: Commitment is a huge theme in the book -- what it means and is it possible in terms of relationships or careers. I certainly think commitment is taken more lightly in this day and age. People now have three or four careers, no one goes and works at a law firm for thirty years like my father did, most people have two or three marriages ? I mean it might be a failed idea. I'd love to commit to something I believe in, but I am not sure I believe in a lot of things.

AW: But haven't you committed to something you believe in?

DG: Well, this book is the first thing in my life that I've truly committed to.

AW: Well, that's certainly something.

DG: It's a lot.

AW: Okay, this is one of my favorite things that you say in the book. You say, "writing is like a religion that way, both require blind faith and a certain ignorance of the obvious." I absolutely agree, but I am wondering what the obvious is for you.

DG: Hmmm. That's a good question. Certainly, writing requires a great deal of blind faith. When you've never been published and you sit down at that blank page to write that book.

AW: God, it's awful and everyone thinks you're living in a dream world.

DG: Yeah. I think every writer knows what that's like, and it's really daunting, and you can't think about the daunting parts of it. You can't ask ? can I sell this book three years down the line when it's finished? Is all this going to happen? I hate to say it, but the old athlete's cliche of, one day at a time, is really true.

AW: Isn't that what they say in AA too?

DG: I don't know yet. But it's really true. You can't think of the big picture. You have to sit there and think of what you're doing in a very small way. It builds up over time, and at some point it does come together, but it requires a lot of faith in the beginning and a lot of head-down determination. What was your question again?

AW: My question was what was this ominous obviousness you had to ignore to get this done?

DG: The obvious for me was that I didn't think I could pull this off. I never went to writing school. I didn't know what I was doing most of time. I didn't have any writing mentor. I wasn't particularly well-read. And I think the obvious was that I was getting in way over my head, but in a way I think it helped because I wasn't aware of the odds that were stacked against me. The reason I didn't go to grad school for writing was because I was scared shitless. I thought I would get around all these writers who were so much better than me and begin to question myself and back out. So I guess staying away from that world helped a great deal in terms of confidence and coming into this with a different background and perspective.

AW: Okay, last question. What are you working on now?

DG: I am working on a novel. I think that while younger writers can write memoirs, one is more than enough, and so I'm trying something totally different. It's a pretty complex politically-tinged novel set in 2008, and it's a big ambitious book, and that's all I am going to discuss about it right now.

AW: Well, thank you so much. It was good talking to you.

DG: Well, thank you.