James McBride on Winning His National Book Award: “I Was Dreading This” - Vanity Fair

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James McBride.

I stood on the fourth floor of a brownstone on West 11th Street and threw some urine-soaked pajamas down the stairwell to the basement level.

That was the first sentence I wrote for James McBride, the National Book Award winner for The Good Lord Bird, mostly known for his memoir,The Color of Water. McBride was my first boss, and before that, my favorite professor. He taught a workshop at NYU about literary nonfiction, and no assignment was graded—instead he would give you a page of personal feedback, which was much more valuable. The first assignment: go to a high place, drop something, and write about the previous day (the story ends with the object hitting the ground). I had no idea what I was doing, so I wrote about my babysitting adventure from the day before (hence piss-soaked pajamas). Our required reading was Gary Smith’s Going Deep, a collection of his most heart-wrenching Sports Illustrated pieces, and A Nietzche Reader. How those two went so beautifully together, it’s impossible to explain.

Then the semester went on and we wrote about heavier and heavier stuff. I ended up delving into my mother’s brain, using her memory as fuel for most of my personal-history assignments. One story, about losing her uncle in a terrible hurricane, my mother basically wrote for me. She was the one who had always wanted to be a writer, but was trapped in nursing scrubs in the most humid city in Texas. James helped us both become better writers. Then, the summer came and my mother died in an accident. I returned to NYU and James asked me to be his assistant. Suddenly all of my past assignments were like found treasure to me; so many stories and words written by my mother that I would have never had otherwise, because how often do we ask our parents to remember the most painful things that happened to them? And this was something James understood, as he had an entire best-selling book (The Color of Water) to honor his mother and preserve her history. There were still so many stories I hadn’t heard.

I worked for James for about a year, in his office dive in Hell’s Kitchen, which he shares with Bill, a saxophone repairman and musician. It was a riot. Musicians came in and out telling stories (or what James called “lies and whoppers”) and belting out songs to test their repaired instruments.


In January 2010, James’s mother, Ruth, passed away. Now we shared this painful bond, as we both struggled to keep moving our lives forward. Today, four years after I left him to work for Vanity Fair, I spoke with James about his National Book Award for The Good Lord Bird, a historical novel about John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry.

VF Daily: So, I imagine your phone has been busy today.

James McBride: My phone has been blasting off the hook since 5:30 this morning!


I saw you this weekend and you didn’t seem too excited about the upcoming ceremony.

I was dreading it. It’s not my style. . . . I’ve never won a major writing award before. I never really sought after one. I hope I never have to be in that position again, where you’re competing against three people who are equally deserving, or more so, than you. That was deeply stressful. But it was great! It was humbling as well. I was really quite shocked. I remembered this morning that I walked up there with my napkin in my hand.

Now you get one of those shiny stickers on your book.

I’m gonna put one of those stickers on my forehead.

Did you dust off your tux?


I got a used tux from one of those wedding-store outlets in New Jersey. He said, “In your size? I’ve got plenty.” I put that sucker on with some sneakers and a porkpie hat . . .


So what did you do after the ceremony?

I went home, fed my cat, and went to bed. I talked to friends on the entire drive home. When I woke up this morning I thought I was dreaming. When something really bad happens, you wake up in the morning and you think you were dreaming and you say, Oh no, it’s real. When you wake up in the morning after something good happens, it’s really sweet. I hope everybody has that feeling, because I haven’t had that feeling in many, many years. My mother died, my niece died two weeks after my mother died, and she was only 28, then six months later, my wife dropped the bomb, now my ex-wife.

So what about today?

I don’t know what to do now! You know what? I know what I’m going to do. I have to be in Brooklyn at six. I’m going to that church in Red Hook, Brooklyn, New Brown Memorial, to teach a music program. We have the kids on buckets until we can figure out who can do what. We don’t have any instruments, just tables and buckets. We’re not getting any till we have enough discipline, because dealing with and storing instruments [is a pain]. We’re teaching them the rudiments of harmony, the notes of the scales.

But before I go there this evening, I know what I’m going to do. There’s a guy who has a junk tire shop about three miles from me. It’s just a bunch of hillbillies who sit around and crack jokes. They don’t care about any of this stuff. I’m going to go there and turn off my phone. I can say anything I want, and I don’t have to worry about being judged. These guys are a bunch of Republican knucklehead hillbillies and they’re good friends of mine. I like them. They’re good people. They’re good-natured folks and they’re my friends. I don’t care what their politics are. We talk about cars and crack jokes, and I can forget about everything for a few hours.

You can’t live for literature. You can’t live for the job. I don’t live for my work. My life is my life. That’s more important, and I think that helps my work. I learn more from sitting with these kids banging drums or yacking about cars than having lunch with someone in Manhattan who’s just read a great book. I understand it’s great to read a great book, but it’s better to live your life. It just helps me. It’s uncomfortable at times, but you have to live outside the circle.