The story is where life takes you (or how it comes to you)
Scott Raab returns to Esquire with a remarkable personal essay about finding family
I started reading Esquire while in college. It happened thanks to Professor Norman Sims at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. I took his creative nonfiction course and got hooked on the style. I’d decided to study journalism when applying for college in 2005 because I wanted to be a poet, but wasn’t a good poet and thought journalism provided a more practical skill and career path. There was no knowing the bottom would fall out of the industry and, well, the entire economy before I graduated. But what I did learn from Sims was that I wanted to write big feature stories. I wanted to write like Joseph Mitchell and Susan Orlean. And then, I discovered Esquire because we had to read “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”. The magazine, under David Granger’s watchful eye, hooked me. It was my subscription. I came to love its writers: Chris Jones, Mike Sager, Tom Junod, Scott Raab, John H. Richardson, and Michael Paterniti, to name a few.
I cherished my copy of the magazine arrived.
And then the magazine I loved disappeared.
Yes, everything dies and comes back to life anew. Change is necessary. I know the magazine wasn’t perfect. The finances weren’t adding up. Readership was drying up. The Internet continued to wreak havoc on the publishing industry. But when the changes happened in 2016, I felt more than a pang of sadness. I felt a bit lost because I wanted nothing more than to write for Esquire and the magazine I loved had ceased to exist. I didn’t fit in with the new mission or the new editorial team. Thankfully, that changed. And I’m happy to report Raab has returned with a heartfelt and blistering essay in the new issue of the magazine entitled, “What Happens When You Suddenly Have a New Family at 71?”
Raab’s essay bring him back to form nearly 10 years after he left the magazine. Here he writes with honesty, recounting his faults, blemishes and warts, while also examining his own family’s lineage. All of this sets up an essay that dives beneath the surface of who we are and into what family means, how we live with our past and what we deserve.
Raab is the author of The Whore of Akron: One Man's Search for the Soul of LeBron James; You're Welcome, Cleveland: How I Helped Lebron James Win a Championship and Save a City; and Once More to the Sky: The Rebuilding of the World Trade Center.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
When did you decide this was an essay you had to write as opposed to something you had to live?
You know, that that's that question could trigger a lot of deep, deep, deep response and also, you know, like venturing into that Janet Malcolm territory of the journalist as betrayer.
I once got a chance to write a book about LeBron James and I was the only guy who who got a book deal who was both an angry Cleveland fan, but also I would have no access to the subject. I don't have that many stories to tell apparently. So throwing my family, my loved ones, or Cheryl Crow, if I'm writing a magazine profile — just to use an example where the chemistry between writer and subject sucked — throwing people under the bus is probably the whole reason I got into writing. In fact, I know it. I was a miserable little kid.
So all of a sudden after impossible, radical luck -- I'm talking luck, luck -- and I don't think it's any insult to my gift or my relentless drive at all to say I met the right guy at just the right time — coming out of a great MFA program. And suddenly stroke of luck after a stroke of luck, which I was smart enough to recognize and had a great time. I started reading Esquire as a shoe salesman in Cleveland in the early 70s and I was there for 19 years under the masterful editor David Granger, who brought me aboard GQ [before]. Talk about luck: I met just the right guy. Young magazine editors wanted to restore longform, and I don't think anyone called it longform in the 90s, but we talked a little about when we were schmoozing, the timing was ridiculously good.
I retired happily. When Hearst decided to get rid of Granger in 2016, I was in a position to kind walk away. The guy who took over wasn't interested in any of the OG Granger guys at all, in fact, he wanted his ring kissed. It was better for me to walk away with whatever dignity one can have as a writer who spent so many years filling the space between the scent strips for the cologne ads. I loved being at Esquire. And and when I left, I wasn't looking for piecework. I was a year late on another LeBron book. You talk about luck.
Our kid fell in love with a Los Angeles native and we moved out to LA, but then also COVID, which now I'm 72 and I got this lymphoma diagnosis, which it sounds so dire, and I guess it's better not to have it, but it's a blood cancer that's treatable, it's incurable, so it comes back and then who knows? So I was adjusting to all this.
New Jersey was was home for many years and Los Angeles [is] place I had a complicated personal and professional relationship with and not on the list of possible retirement places, but we have the one kid and and he's aces, I mean, he's just a great guy and we're terrific parents. We're pretty happy, I got to say, but the first year of cancer treatment was worse than I expected. It was arduous because I have been lucky, especially because I haven't treated my body particularly well, but I'm in remission. I still have to adjust to COVID because the cancer drugs kill all the vaccine. Then all of a sudden our one kid comes over one day and this young woman got in touch with him and it's his half-sister from sperm donations that I made back in the 1990s. I had talked about this in a light hearted way. I had thought about it, but back then, that was pre-23Andme and I signed away happily. I was married to my first wife. We didn't have kids and she was a resident and it was an early fertility clinic, there weren't a lot of them, and the donors were spouses and male med students.
Look, this stuff happens and as more and more people send their genome profile, send their samplings in, it'll happen more.
But it struck me because is anything nonfiction? Is anything fiction? I don't mean to to sound so loopy, but it was, and I hate the word epiphany, but there have been a lot of times where things have worked out in a magical kind of sense from my point of view -- LeBron and his journey among them -- where I've I've suddenly been witness to something that felt a lot bigger than me. And I made too much of it as a writer like me will, but I knew right away and my new biological daughter, when we met, said, "are you going to write about this?" She had no issue with it. I said something like, "I already have the first sentence."
I wrote that sentence in Esquire.
I don't have an easy time separating, I mean, I had a bad childhood and there are people behind every door who might have had worse ones, but mine was mine. So the idea of family, the idea of becoming a father, all that stuff was as alien to me as if I would ever write for Esquire for 19 years. And I love being a father. I was 47 the summer our son was born and it changed my life in all the cliché ways.
I don't think I'm an evangelist for parenthood, but I think about guys like Philip Roth, guys who were models in some ways when I was young because I came up as a poet and a fiction writer and a master of fine arts, I always thought it was a literary, not just an aspiration, but like the golden fleece. But I wasn't that guy and even that guy in the sense of Philip Roth, you know, this is a guy who was always a teenage boy in a lot of ways. I really wanted to be a well adjusted male, which seemed like a a much greater reach than, well, anything.
That's a good thing to jump off on because I do think, you know, well, Roth, maybe my favorite book of his is the most childish in the “Sabbath's Theater”.
That's that's absolutely pissing on, cumming on.
But then the one that I think that affected me the most is “Patrimony.” Because it's the one time where he lets his guard down and become somewhat of an adult.
And with a toothbrush is cleaning his father's feces.
And that's the thing that is missing. There is a maturity to that book, while still having some of the same dark humor. There is something to be said for growing up, right?
I hope there is, but I'd be misstating it if I thought there had to be an inverse relationship. I just think that, at some point, I realized if I was going to take the writing as seriously as I could, I had to make the trade, because I got out of the MFA program and immediately started writing op-eds for the student paper, The Daily Iowan, and loved it. I mean, I was getting 25 bucks a pop. Anyway, life let me know I wasn't Philip Roth. I wasn't going to be Philip Roth and, all of a sudden, I was on this magic carpet ride of nonfiction where my voice was actually valued.
I was already 40, 41, when I met Granger and I already had a writing voice and he liked it and that was hugely important. So I had the choice there since I knew I wasn't going to be a a significant novelist, or even a significant writer in the sense I had always aspired to, or an academic, I tried. I would have go up to the American Studies department but had so many MFA people wandering in their office with no ambition. It just sounded good.
I didn't want to be a fop or a dilettante. I wanted to be a good guy. I wanted to have a family once I met Lisa. She wasn't in any way looking to get married much less be a be a mother, but the way we fit and then we started 12 Stepping because we were raging alcoholics, she and I, everything worked out so well. So I don't want to diss Philip Roth so much as I guess I had not a Sophie's choice at all. I had David Granger, the best boss I think a writer like me could ever have, and I found love and became a parent. Having that happen at the right time was miraculous to me.
So with this story then you all leave in 2016, the editors go and the magazine is different, so why come back with this one? You've written a few other things, but this is the one that I said, this is Scott Raab's voice. So why is this the one that you go like, I gotta write this now?
I'm long winded forgive me, but I I don't often get a chance to talk about this stuff.
I was happy to disappear. I was upset, not personally in terms of [that] I loved Esquire. I loved Esquire for a long time and the way they did what they did, I thought was was wrong, kind of heartbreaking, not to the writers, but to Granger, who was willing to to try anything to do anything to and a hardworking guy and and the guy they brought, in none of those things. But in the summer of 2016 I had like three months to write 60,000 words roughly.
I wrote a book when LeBron left for Miami called “The Whore of Akron” -- and I'm not trying to sell the book, God knows -- so when he came back, the same editor as were still were still at Harper Collins and no one yet knew that the Golden State Warriors were a dynasty, were going to become a dynasty. So there was a second book called “You're Welcome, Cleveland, How I Helped LeBron James Win a Championship and Save a City”.
I had three months to write that book.
I had already spent like the whole summer while my wife and son were on his college tour trying to to churn out the book, which is a first draft compared to “The Whore of Akron”, but it was a contract and I wanted to get it done. I already had one book from the early 90s that I that I never got done and you you know when you haven't done your best work or you've shortchanged someone.
Anyhow, I promised myself I wouldn't take any more piecework from magazines unless it was a grocery bill related concern. I don't want to write about stuff I don't really care about. I really don't.
Cleveland sports has been like a religious thing for me and it still is, but everything I had to say about almost everything I had really ample opportunity to say. And if there's one thing — and it's not a critique of myself, my crew, my boss — that every platform needs now, it's not old white guys who already made money writing. It was never clearer to me. I haven't been in print in Esquire since 2016, so it's a huge thrill for me and the characters have changed.
I did do an online piece for them at the beginning of the pandemic a long piece about a wrestler who had been at Ohio State when Jim Jordan was an assistant coach and where there had been a physician who'd been preying on on young male athletes for decades. That piece meant a lot to me, but this was different.
That first year of cancer treatment I have time. I dive into theology, a prayer, I try to come to more and better terms. I do a lot of therapy. I do a lot of THC. I had 19 years of total sobriety, now I'm like California sober.
I was a recluse before the pandemic, so our lives had shrunk because of COVID and because of cancer treatment, but two new kids come along and this biological daughter looked for me and we were all so excited and I couldn't believe it. I mean I couldn't not write about it.
The best memoirs are ones where the the narrator is almost unlikable, or knows that they're unlikable and knows that they have flaws. And you are like, man, I am gonna lay them out. Here I am, my family has flaws, I have flaws. And I wonder if that was a conscious decision or if that came up later.
I think I need to talk about the past a lot. I think I need to confront the things that fill me with the most shame. There's a line in the piece that makes me sound very wise, which is, “guilt is feeling like a bad kid and atonement is like moving forward as a better man,” and I believe that.
My parents got out of the parent business long before I could establish an independent existence. As the oldest child of what they used to call a broken home and a violent, kind of abusive household, but thank God, not in the relentlessly physical or God forbid sexual sense, so that's why I say, don't don't cry for me, Argentina, but I grew up feeling not just unloved, but I wasn't just a black sheep, I was the guy that my cousins would be told, “don't turn out like him.” And for some good reason. I was a very angry young guy and writing was all I had until I found alcohol. And instead of acting out or writing, I did both and I like to face that stuff.
I really loved my job and whether it was an introduction to the sandwich package or a profile of Charlize Theron or Bill Murray. You know, that was a good job. Don't think I don't miss that job. It was cool. It never wore off on me, but writing for me is evisceration. I'm heavily first person. One of the reasons it's nice to hear from a younger guy like you talk about coming to know what I was writing for Esquire is because I'm not the guy who won the National Magazine Awards. I'm really not. I mean you can't even characterize yourself, but what I know is that from 1993 until 2016, I wrote a lot of stuff for two great magazines, GQ and then Esquire, but] I was never even a finalist, and I attribute part of that not to a lack of talent, but to my voice, which is very profane, very revealing, very me, me me. And I totally get that it's not for everyone. I should have been a standup comic, but I don't have that performance thing.
I love writing about stuff like this where I can look back. I mean, I literally tried to to kill my grandfather. Years later, because I was stuck there and they were stuck with me, he was coming up the path and I had like a D cell battery and I almost took out his eye. I was a broken kid, so having these two biological kids show up and they're both delightful human beings proves nurture, not nature. To me it made feel redeemed in a way that becoming a father made me feel redeemed.
I also don't think if you were 41 and this was your first magazine piece and writing about your parents, you couldn't you couldn't do it honestly.
No.
There is something about distance that I think is valuable and it's something we don't reward.
If you do it right and by it, I mean, just try and and live your life by a set of ethics and values that reflects the best in you, which is what sobriety and twelve steps meant to me, what therapy meant. It was an effort over many years, not continuous, but, I know I'm better than this. I know that I'm capable of giving someone the love that I yearned for as a kid. So I'm a little bit over-therapized in that way, and I'm not I'm not very pious about stuff, but I do worry that men are not really encouraged to go deep about their own feelings.
Is there anything else you want to add about this story?
I did run drafts by the about my biological kids. You know, for me, it's a very easy thing, meaning, I'm a happy guy, basically. I say basically because I don't know that anyone reading it would fully get that sense.
And that was the Scott Rabb thing was I always felt like you were angry on the other side.
I always angry. I don't want to sound twelve-steppy, but that's an old issue, partly because anything I say is going to sound pompous as hell. Just the idea that I was able to to put this in Esquire, that the stars is aligned at a point where I was bursting to tell the story, but it also helped connect me because it's very awkward for both biological children. In one case, my son's case, his dad's dying, his parents never told him [about me]. And in my biological daughter's case, it was all a big thrill for all of us, but her parents, it turned out, were very upset. They had never told her either. So it's it's complicated and emotional for them and I don't want to overstep whatever bounds there are. I am simply the guy who made a sperm donation and they kept it cold. I don't want to do schtick about these two beautiful kids. The fact that they exist fills me with a kind of love and joy that's peculiar and maybe it's emotional overstepping, but being able to write about it, have them look at drafts, have them give me feedback, make sure that they knew I wasn't exposing their identities and because I don't want to have a negative impact on their lives at all.
It meant the world to me to be able to write to share the drafts with them so that they could change as fact checkers but feeling checkers too.