Liftoff

Throughout the ups and downs of life and a 50-plus-year writing career, things still seem funny to Tom McGuane, ’62.

February 25, 2024

Tom McGuane’s longtime Montana neighbor and friend, actor Michael Keaton, had a problem. The night before, Keaton had awoken to find his house ablaze. The fire, which may have started in a propane grill on Keaton’s porch, spread to the attic and roof before being doused by the Big Timber Volunteer Fire Department. The next morning, McGuane, after hearing the details, including the possibility that the house might be a goner, drolly asked Keaton if a tent catalog might help. “You jerk*!” replied Keaton, still smudged with smoke. “I’m homeless!”

“I can’t help it. Things seem funny to me,” said McGuane, sitting on his porch on a glorious fall day, the kind that surely attracted the writer to the area in the first place. “My heroes when I was young were writers like Gogol, also Ilf and Petrov. They wrote these serious yet comic stories. ‘Laughter through tears’ is the Russian expression.”

Occasions for tears have been frequent in the years since. Jim Harrison, a close friend and fellow Spartan with whom he exchanged weekly letters for decades, died in 2016. More recently came dual cancer diagnoses for his brother-in-law, Jimmy Buffett, who died in September 2023, and his wife of nearly 50 years, Laurie, who appeared vibrant and healthy on the day of this interview, still with “a smile that could paint your house,” as described in a 1986 profile of McGuane in The Washington Post.

 

“For a young writer, you have no reason to believe that what you’re doing is very important. It looks like a waste of time to most people, including your parents.”

 

McGuane had politely waved off interview requests during the pandemic when Laurie was in treatment, and he was her primary caregiver. “My marriage is by far the most important thing in my life and has been for decades,” he said, adding a quick one-word answer when prompted for the secret of a lasting partnership: “Comedy.”

McGuane’s lasting success as a writer traces back in part to the lucky break of getting paired with Russel Nye as a faculty advisor at MSU. Nye, a Pulitzer winner, told McGuane to protect his writing and keep at it no matter the academic, financial and other pressures that were sure to come along. “It was a vote of faith in what I might do,” McGuane said. “For a young writer, you have no reason to believe that what you’re doing is very important. It looks like a waste of time to most people, including your parents.”

With a new contract at The New Yorker, McGuane is still chipping away at his project, which seems to be documenting the tragi-comic nature of relationships and being human in a time of unrelenting change. He brushed off questions about faith, but his persistent efforts to evoke a smile, whether on the page or face to face, leave a distinct balm-for-the-soul impression, or at least a grin.

What about a one-word rallying cry to summarize his life’s purpose? “That’s pretty restrictive,” he said, before cracking a mysterious smirk. Maybe it was a fleeting thought of his wild times in the 1970s (which earned him the nickname Captain Berserko), or of old friend Harrison’s final poem, which included a line about the “tender connection between men and galaxies,” or, most likely, of looking forward to walking with Laurie and the dogs with the sun still coming down through the cottonwoods, which hadn’t yet lost their leaves for the season.

“Space travel? No, that’s two words,” he said, the smile spreading across his craggy face. “How about ‘liftoff’?”

 

*He didn’t say “jerk.”

 

Contributing Writer(s): Geoff Koch