FFB: A WRITER PREPARES by Lawrence Block (LB Productions 2021)

This is a rather belated acknowledgement and review of this fine memoir, by one of the best writers of crime fiction we have had, and one who is (like his colleague and contemporary and mostly sf and fantasy writer Robert Silverberg) overseeing some of his earliest pseudonymous work (for the "men's sweat" magazines and the like) of the late '50s/early '60s, and his erotica novels likewise and from the same era, coming out in new editions and collections. Block is releasing some of his work thus himself, much as he has this volume, under his own ebook imprint, and it's seen prompter reviews such as these, from:

James Reasoner

Michael Dirda

Colman Keane

Andrew Wheeler

and others, which (unsurprisingly), Block has assembled on a reviews page on his ebooks site. and which give you at least as much insight on the work at hand as I'm likely to do. But among the things I noted as I read it, and even though it's assembled from essentially two previously stalled attempts as early-career/life memoir, and a continuation that takes us to the point that Block is about to go about the business of a professional writing career with him writing consistently work he wants to write and is not unhappy to sign his name to, in the early/mid '60s (the second of the interrupted passages, mostly written in a spurt at a retreat/residency in 1994, ends in mid-sentence, and that disruption is preserved here, as the narrative is picked up on the next page). There is little here, if anything, that suffers from the surface appearance of rough-drafting that might suggest. 

One thing Block seems amused and bemused by, as he reflects, is a consistent bloody-mindedness on his own part, an unwillingness to take the path of least resistance even when that might well've been the safer bet, the arguably more sensible approach. And he tends to both critique himself and to put forth some evidence, not necessarily required to tell the main narrative of his life but for whatever reason useful to include, such as his occasional youthful seeking out the services of prostitutes and his live and let live attitude toward one friend who, as a middle-aged man, conducted a years-long affair with a girl from her earliest puberty to her breaking it off with the man when she was almost at voting age (slightly different Challenges to the Reader than "Ellery Queen" used to specialize in). Meanwhile, the more important developments are limned, such as how he realized his work-study adventures via Antioch College (which specialized almost to a fault in such a program) led to him realizing that he was fitting into the work world, via the Scott Meredith Literary Agency and the early writing assignments he took on in various capacities in and out of that clangorous workhouse (and scam perpetrator), better than anything the imprimatur of finishing his Antioch degree would ever help with...and how also a safe, steady corporate job, however much security it might provide for his new family after marriage and how good he was at what was required by it, just was not going to be the right fit for him in the long term...and, yet also, how often he would let his not always justifiable sense that he needed to See This or That Thing Through lead him down needlessly troublesome pathways, even if only temporarily. I can relate. I suspect too many of us can. 

This is a compelling and informative, informal and instructive, look at how it is and what it means to be its author, and that's what memoirs are for...it certainly fills in a sense, particularly, of how life worked at the Meredith Agency, which Barry Malzberg and others have written about at length or too briefly as well, in a more matter-of-fact manner than many have done (SMLA was entirely too influential to Tell All about, at its height, and it certainly touched on the lives and work of too many of the more interesting writers, editors and others over the past century to not be looked into in detail, as Block makes clear, while not taking on the panoramic task himself, at very least at this time). 

Block needed to be a writer, and we are all better off that he met that need. And this is an eminently readable and insightful account of how that happened, and the times and situations in which it happened in. Not too much more one could ask for, except perhaps for more similar memoirs from some of the other participants, and anything Block chooses to eventually say at similar length, beyond the framing comments provided here about the composition of  this book, about how things have gone since.