Good lies and bad sex with Clancy Martin

Generally uncontested truths about Clancy Martin:

• He is a philosophy professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, specializing in existentialism.

• He is one of the “Ethics Professors,” a panel on KCUR 89.3’s Up to Date that once a month discusses and analyzes the ethical implications of current events.

• He teaches courses on business ethics and occasionally does paid consulting work for corporations on this topic.

• He worked as a “professional liar” (his words) selling jewelry in Texas for more than a decade.

• Seven years ago, he tried to hang himself in his closet with a bedsheet. He tried again three years later, following an alcohol relapse.

• His first two marriages ended due to his infidelity.

• Last year, Martin was required to blow into an alcohol-monitoring device in order to see his children.

“It’s called the Soberlink 2, and it has facial recognition software that takes a picture of you while you blow into a breathalyzer so the person monitoring knows it’s you blowing,” Rebecca Martin, Martin’s second wife, says. One of the outcomes of the Martins’ divorce is that Rebecca has since established a legal practice in downtown Kansas City specializing in family law.

“She had watched me descend back into the dregs of relapse and alcoholism over and over again,” Martin told me earlier this month, inside his home on an appealing stretch of Forest Avenue in midtown. “So in order to get back regular visitation with the girls” — he and Rebecca have two daughters; Martin has another daughter from his first marriage — “I agreed in mediation to [it].”

Martin wasn’t eager to say much more on this topic, for two seemingly contradictory reasons. One is that the process was difficult for him. “Even though it’s self-inflicted, it’s a big emotional hurdle for a parent to jump over to accept the fact that you can’t be trusted with your own children,” he said. The other reason is that he recently finished writing a piece about the experience for Harper’s. “I don’t really want to give too much away before it comes out,” he said.

It was the Tuesday after Labor Day, and Martin was getting over a two-day cold. He poured me a sparkling water out of some kind of device that screeched as it purified the liquid, and he settled cross-legged on a blue couch in his living room. Martin is 47, but with his full head of mussed hair and casual-professor look — blue jeans, button-downs, colorful socks, smart boots — he scans younger. He’d had the kids for the weekend, but now they were back at their mom’s, and he was on his own for the week — just him and the dog, a labradoodle named Simha Mukha. His third wife, Amie Barrodale, who is also a writer, was out of town on a monthlong spiritual retreat that Martin was also reluctant to discuss, for reasons having to do with her privacy.

Beyond that and the Soberlink, though, Martin was game to discuss all the gory details of his life. This is an interesting exercise. On the one hand, it’s great fun because the stories are exciting — sex, drugs, alcohol, lies, divorce, death — and Martin is good company. On the other hand, if you follow Martin’s highly personal work, there’s a decent chance that you’ve already heard the tales.

One of the first stories he told me — about a trip to a jewelry convention in Las Vegas that ended with three prostitutes stealing several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of loose diamonds from Martin and his brother Darren after an ecstasy-fueled hotel-room fuckfest (a reasonably verifiable story) — I encountered a few days later while catching up on Martin’s back catalog of published work. It opens “All That Glitters,” a Harper’s essay that Martin wrote in 2010 about the jewelry business. A few times, Martin began recounting some other nugget from his life that I recognized as having happened to the main character in How to Sell, his well-reviewed and satisfyingly sleazy 2009 debut novel, published by Farrar Straus & Giroux. The details, sometimes even the order in which the details unspooled, were more or less identical. His memories and his work are mashed so closely together that it is nearly impossible to differentiate one from the other.

Take Bad Sex, Martin’s taut, brisk new novel that will be released this week by Tyrant Books. Giancarlo DiTrapano, publisher of Tyrant, came across Bad Sex two years ago, when The Milan Review published it under the name Travels in Central America.

“I tore through it immediately,” DiTrapano said. “I like writers who lay it on the line with their personal lives, who write really true things about themselves, whether it’s fiction or not. The Milan Review is a small foreign press, and I just thought this book should have a life in America.” He’s printing an initial run of 10,000 copies of Bad Sex — the most Tyrant has ever done for a book.

Three years ago, though, Bad Sex was a memoir.

“I showed it to [former Farrar Straus & Giroux editor, now editor of The Paris Review] Lorin Stein and [Martin’s agent] Susan Golomb, and they both basically said, ‘Do not publish this as memoir. It will ruin your life,'” Martin told me. “So I changed it to a female narrator and heavily fictionalized the narrator’s husband and children in order to create some distance there. I didn’t want my daughters to think they are the children depicted in the book.”

In Bad Sex, the narrator has an affair with her husband’s lawyer. In real life, Martin’s affair was with a magazine editor. “Cheating on your husband is a lot like doing cocaine,” Brett, the narrator of Bad Sex, observes. “It’s rarely pleasurable, but try quitting.”

The epigraph, a quote from Alejandro Zambra, reads, “This wasn’t invented, it really happened.”

The second time I met with Martin, in his book-lined office on the second floor of UMKC’s Cockefair Hall, he asked if I had seen The End of the Tour, the recent movie about a Rolling Stone journalist (David Lipsky, played by Jesse Eisenberg) interviewing the late literary heavyweight David Foster Wallace (played by Jason Segel) over the course of a five-day road trip in 1996. The parallel that he meant to draw to our arrangement was plain. I told him that I had, and we agreed that Eisenberg’s performance as Lipsky was weaselly and unpleasant.

Martin became distracted by something on his computer screen. After a few seconds, he apologized and said, “That’s so funny — I just got an e-mail not 30 seconds ago from Jon Franzen. I sent him a note earlier congratulating him on the nice review Purity got in the Times yesterday.”

Jonathan Franzen and Martin are friendly. They share an agent, Franzen blurbed How to Sell (“Dirty, greatly original and very hard to stop reading”), and the two correspond regularly, Martin says. I asked what Franzen had just sent, feeling very aware and ashamed of the Lipsky-like nature of my behavior — prying for a lit-celebrity morsel in the hope that it might marginally improve my eventual story. You decide:

“He says, ‘Thanks, I haven’t read the review but am told it was mostly positive,” Martin recited. He laughed and went on. “Then he says, ‘I’m also told she'” — Michiko Kakutani, the widely feared New York Times book critic — “‘wrote that the book contained several Dickensian coincidences, which there are none, so some things never change.'”

Though Martin’s work has been widely praised by critics (The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Village Voice, GQ, Esquire) and fellow writers (Zadie Smith, Sam Lipsyte and Gary Shteyngart also blurbed How to Sell), a New York Times rave has proved elusive. How to Sell met the unfortunate fate of being assigned to a critic who spent more time reviewing (and disapproving of) the book’s positive early critical reception than the actual words inside it.

This past March, Martin released Love and Lies, a philosophical memoir about “truthfulness, deceit, and the growth and care of erotic love,” as the book’s subtitle reads. It was panned in The New York Times Sunday Book Review. Among other things, the reviewer, Adelle Waldman (fresh off the success of her novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.), called it “remarkably insight-free.”

“He [Martin] is far less interested in grappling with his culpability for lies told than in ferreting out the subtle forces that made him the ever-so complicated person he is,” Waldman added.

“It was a real kick in the belly,” Martin told me. “I was sent the review in advance by an editor at the Times, with a little note of apology, sort of saying, ‘Sorry about this. We respect your writing’ — I write for the Books section regularly and have written op-eds for them — ‘but this is what we’re running, this is the review.’

“Then I called Susan, my agent, and I was laughing and crying at the same time,” Martin continued. “I was literally reading the review and laughing and crying. I just felt like, ‘My career is over.’ I mean, it was a very high-profile bad review.”

I asked if he had ever blasted anybody’s book in the Times Sunday Book Review.

“Oh, yeah: Rick Moody,” Martin said. “What was that book?” He did some Googling. “Right — The Four Fingers of Death.” He skimmed his 2010 review. “I mean, I really loved Rick Moody’s early books. I read The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven and was like, ‘I can’t write this good. Why even try to write?’ I mean, it was kind of discouraging, really. And I thought his book about depression was very good. But yeah, this one I didn’t think was so good.”

I asked if he had any desire to rebut some of Waldman’s criticisms.

“I mean, it’s best not to respond to your critics, right?” he said. “I think she made some fair points. There’s things I’d do differently if I rewrote it. I think, in places, it’s too academic, too pedantic. I think my agent was hoping it would be received as more of a Malcolm Gladwell type of book, but about love. Well — no such luck.” He laughed.

Aside from being the most notorious and, very possibly, the best writer now residing in Kansas City, Martin is also a pretty accomplished philosophy professor. He was chairman of the department until a few years ago — “For a variety of reasons, I wasn’t very good at being in charge,” he told me — and now teaches several philosophical subjects at UMKC, including a Nietzsche seminar, “19th-Century Philosophy” and “Philosophy and Literature.” He has written several philosophy textbooks and recently recorded a Great Courses disc called “Moral Decision Making: How to Approach Everyday Ethics.” He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011.

A scene in How to Sell seems to explain how, or maybe why, Martin ended up tenured in Kansas City rather than rich off Rolexes in Texas. An employee named Old John asks Bobby — the Martin surrogate character, a jewelry store owner — when he’s going to quit the business and go to college. “I’m a businessman,” Bobby protests. “I’m the best salesman in this store, Old John.”

“I didn’t say you weren’t a salesman,” Old John replies. “That’s the chief problem. I’ve never seen one better. But a salesman is the opposite of a businessman, Bobby. A businessman cares about the practical details of his life. A salesman is an artist. He can’t tie his own shoelaces. He lives on tomorrow. He’s a cloud-and-sky guy, a rainbow man. He can’t hold money.”

He adds: “You can’t snap your fingers and become American, Bobby. It has to come naturally.”

Like Bobby, Martin grew up mischievous in Calgary, Alberta. (It seems likely that Martin’s northern accent was an asset as a salesman in Texas; you don’t expect a guy who says “aboot” to try to swindle you.) He smoked his first cigarette at age 6, took acid at 9. When he was 16, in a vain attempt to hold onto a girlfriend who had moved on, he lied about being kicked out of his home and convinced her parents to let him stay at their house. Her father gave Martin a job at a local factory.

“This girl — her name was Shawna — she really loved when I would write her letters, these very sexual letters,” Martin told me. “I would write them all the time because, usually, it would result in us having sex later. Well, one day I wrote her a very detailed letter involving a fantasy that included her mother as well. Then she left it in her overcoat, and her dad found it. I came home from the factory, and he charged out the front door at me, tackled me in the snow, beat me up. He was a small man but he was built like a bull. Anyway, I was no longer welcome at their house. At that point, my mom said, ‘Maybe you better go live with your brother in Texas.'”

Martin ended up spending much of his teenage years and early 20s working with Darren in the jewelry trade in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. For many years, he sold jewelry at a Fort Worth store during summers and Christmas breaks from Stetson University in Florida. He learned the business. He learned how to sell.

“The darkest thing I learned selling jewelry is that, especially with rich people, there is no easier way to sell them something than by letting them know that, by buying it, they’re taking advantage of someone else’s disadvantage,” Martin told me. “If you tell somebody they’re getting a deal because the person who previously owned it had to sell it quickly to pay off a debt or because your diamond wholesaler went bankrupt or something like that, they love it. It’s one of the best techniques there is.”

After getting his undergraduate degree, Martin enrolled in the graduate philosophy program at the University of Texas–Austin. He got a scholarship to study in Copenhagen. He married his first wife, Alicia. Then one day, his brother called. He needed to buy out his business partner and asked if Martin would help him write a business proposal for investors. He needed to raise half a million dollars.

“He ended up raising $10 million,” Martin told me. “My brother said, ‘Quit wasting your time in grad school and come join me, and we’ll get rich.’ I told myself I’d do it five years, get rich, then become a full-time writer. I ended up doing it six and a half years before I quit and went back to finish grad school.”

In that six-and-a-half-year window, Martin and his brother opened stores in Arlington, Dallas and Fort Worth. They made a lot of money. Then they lost a lot of money. Martin left his wife for a saleswoman at one of their stores, and the two of them opened a wine bar called Cork. Then Martin tried to acquire a company called Swest that made tools and equipment for the jewelry and optical industries.

“I had a deal all set up, had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on attorneys’ fees and bankers’ fees, but it was taking me a little extra time to raise some extra money outside the purchase agreement,” Martin said. “What happened was, the 800-pound gorilla in that industry is a company called Stuller. The owner is a savvy guy, and he got wind of my deal and called the Swest owner and said, ‘How much is this kid paying you?’ And he said $4 million. And the Stuller guy said, ‘What if I write you a check today for $6 million?’ And that was it. I lost my ass. I still had a little money saved, but that was the end for me. I was on vacation in Wilmington, North Carolina, when I got the call that the deal was dead. I was driving a BMW and I threw the cellphone out the window and said, ‘I’m quitting the wine bar. I’m quitting jewelry. I’m gonna write a novel.’ And I did. I moved to Wilmington for a year and wrote the first draft of How to Sell. It was no good, and it was another seven or eight years before I finished that book. But that was the beginning of everything.”

He returned to UT’s grad program in 2000 — “They were gracious enough to welcome me back, even though I had abruptly left seven years before” — and received his doctorate in 2003. He wrote his dissertation on Nietzsche’s theory of deception. “My interest in philosophy, and specifically deception, is a direct result of working in the jewelry business,” Martin said. “It was a soulless place where you saw the worst sides of people every single day. It just seemed like there had to be something more.”

He met Rebecca, who would become his second wife. He got a job in Kansas City. She got accepted to law school at the University of Kansas. They moved north.

At school in Austin, Martin had begun drinking during the day.

“I’d never done that before,” he said. “Then, the next five years, I went from being an alcoholic in training to a full-blown, raging alcoholic. By 2005, I was drinking at least three bottles of wine a day, and usually another six or eight beers.”

In a drunken blackout one night in 2005 — Martin writes of the event in “The Drunk’s Club,” a 2011 essay for Harper’s about Alcoholics Anonymous — he punched Rebecca in the face. He quit drinking, briefly. Then he spent three years as a secret drinker, a condition he has chronicled in essays for Vice and the London Review of Books.

“We were living over off 38th and Walnut, and I would drive over to — what’s that place west on 39th Street, that little hut?”

“Mr. Z’s?”

“Mr. Z’s. I’d go there and buy a pint of Jägermeister, because it was far enough away from our place that my wife would never go there. I’d take two big swallows in the parking lot, then get in the car and go buy diapers or groceries at Sun Fresh, or wherever I was supposed to be going. Then I’d finish the pint after that and head home. I knew exactly how much I needed and exactly how much I could handle.”

Over time, the alcohol stopped delivering pleasure, and depression took root. These were also the years, Martin says, when he really learned to write. After finishing a few academic philosophy books, he returned to the craft of fiction. He had a few stories published in small literary publications, such as Noon.

“I detected a powerful and authentic voice,” Diane Williams, editor of Noon, told me. “Brave — he’d say anything about what most people refuse to face. The resulting intimacy of the speech is remarkable, as is the drama.”

In 2007, Martin finished what he thought was a strong draft of How to Sell. Shortly after, he got an e-mail from Lorin Stein.

“I tried to delete the e-mail because I thought it was spam,” Martin said. “Then I saw I hadn’t deleted it and opened it, and it was Lorin saying he’d read my stuff in Noon and really liked it, and was I working on anything else. I sent over 100 pages of How to Sell, and he e-mailed the next day and said, ‘Send me the rest right now.’ ”

In 2008, Martin got, he said, “stone-cold sober for two years — no secret drinking, totally sober.” This was after his first suicide attempt, just as How to Sell was released to cheers from the literary establishment. But this time was marked by, he told me, “crippling depression, just ghastly depression”

“I didn’t know what depression was until I went through it,” he said. “The book came out, and it was the worst year of my life, no question. Then ‘The Drunk’s Club’ came out in Harper’s, and it was kind of a crazy success, and I was hearing from fancy, famous people, and my editor was thrilled. And then I went to Boston for a philosophy conference and met a woman and ended up drinking again. And that was the end of marriage number two.”

Professors, particularly those in the humanities and, perhaps most of all, philosophy professors, are expected to exhibit a specific kind of dignity. But this kind of ivory-tower decorum — or its foundering on the shoals of alcoholism and infidelity — seems never to have much distracted Martin.

Walter Kirn — like Martin, a celebrated novelist, essayist and professor — told me: “I think what makes Clancy’s memoir and fiction special is that it’s distinguished by the philosophical rigor that’s obviously the fruit of his academic training. He has a genius for interrogating his own life for larger truths about humans and human flaws — about what makes them tick in the real world as opposed to the ideal world.”

He went on: “A lot of memoir is basically self-congratulatory. Somebody went through a difficult time and then came out on top and redeemed themselves. Clancy is more comfortable with ambiguity and the irrational, and even negative energy.”

Wayne Vaught, the dean of UMKC’s College of Arts and Sciences (and Martin’s fellow “Ethics Professor” on KCUR), has known Martin since 2003, when Martin arrived in KC. They’re friends, and they teach a class together every fall called “Money, Medicine and Morals.” In Love and Lies, Martin writes that Vaught picked him up from Research Medical Center after one of his suicide attempts and took him to the Peanut on Main for chicken wings.

“Our tenure guidelines are designed exactly for people doing what Clancy is doing,” Vaught told me. “They’re there to protect people working in highly controversial areas. The purpose of higher education is to expose people to all sorts of perspectives. So yeah, I’m a strong supporter of free speech in the academy, and in that regard, I support his freedom. Now just because you support their freedom doesn’t necessarily mean you agree with everything they say or do.”

“UMKC, I have to say, has been incredibly supportive,” Martin said. “They’ve always said, ‘Write whatever you want to write.’ ” He paused. “I do think that maybe, between Love and Lies and, now, Bad Sex, there might be some people who would appreciate it if I took a little break from writing things that are so, maybe, morally dubious.”

“Money, Morals and Medicine” is a 400-student class held in the auditorium of the Miller Nichols Library. Many of the students are freshmen who are planning to enter some kind of health-care profession.

“It’s got kind of a Jerry Springer thing to it,” Vaught said in his spacious office just prior to walking over to class.

“Minus the paternity tests,” Martin added.

I saw what they meant when I sat in one August afternoon. Equipped with microphones, Martin and Vaught led the discussion like co-hosts on a stage. Hypothetical scenarios involving controversial topics, including drugs and abortion, were presented as thought experiments on the first day of class. Vaught, drily funny and composed — deanlike — took the lead. Martin wandered around the room, nodding his head and interjecting when the opportunity to quip presented itself. When a student had something to say, Martin jogged over and handed him or her the mic. The crowd started out shy but by the end of class had warmed up — too many hands in the air to call on all of them.

Earlier, in “Philosophy of the Mind,” a 20-student class that Martin teaches on his own, he was more nervous-seeming, though in a boyish, bumbling, charming way. He had brought two cans of Diet Coke and set them both on the desk at the front of the room. When a student asked a question, he walked over and asked his or her name, extended his hand and said, “Hi, my name is Clancy. Nice to meet you.”

He told the students — juniors and seniors, more likely to be philosophy majors — that in recent years, he had studied secret lectures on the philosophy of the mind with famous yogis and gurus. “They’re so secret, I can’t even tell you where I studied with them,” he said. “But in a way, the last three years of my life have been spent preparing for this course.”

He recited a yogi line that went something like “When you recognize that anger is the same thing as looking at a chair, that’s reaching a higher consciousness.”

Then he said, “I happen to subscribe to the view that all of us can read each other’s minds.” He laughed and gestured at a student in the front row. “Like, this guy is thinking, ‘This is the greatest professor I’ve ever had.’ ”

“Actually,” the student said, “I was thinking, ‘Why two Cokes?’ ”

Martin hesitated for a second and said, “Oh, anxiety, I guess? I’m more comfortable when I have something to sip. For my first few years teaching, actually, I would get nervous before class, and I’d read the New Testament for an hour before class. Not for any religious reason — at that time, I was as far removed from Judeo-Christian beliefs as I’ve ever been. But for whatever reason, it calmed me down.”

Martin examined the can in his hand. It was part of Coke’s line of products that feature various names on the cans. It read, “Mom.” He reached over and turned the other can on the desk around. It read, “Better Half.”

He laughed and held them both up. “If you read my books,” Martin told the class, “you’ll find out that this is pretty much my whole story.”

Martin met his third wife, Amie Barrodale, when she interviewed him for a column she was writing for Vice. (She is now the fiction editor at Vice and has a book of short stories slated for release next year via Farrar, Straus & Giroux.) They corresponded over the Internet, eventually meeting in person in May 2012. A week later, Martin proposed to her, outside a Barneys in Seattle. “It took me three months to convince her it was a good idea,” he told me. They were married in August 2012, in northern India, in the lower Himalayas, by “the great Tibetan Buddhist lama Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, who is also an acclaimed writer and filmmaker,” Martin said.

For two years, while Barrodale attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, they commuted between here and Iowa City. They have since settled in Kansas City. Neither drinks, and they both are practicing Buddhists. In a bathroom at their house is a copy of Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, by Chögyam Trungpa. In a dedicated room on the second floor, Martin says, they try to meditate for two hours every morning. Then they go to work: Martin writing in his downstairs study and then teaching at school, and Barrodale upstairs at a desk with a blue typewriter on it.

When I stopped by on a Tuesday evening, Martin had just received some good news. There was word from his agent that a positive review of Bad Sex was forthcoming from the Los Angeles Times. And Anonymous Content, a production company that has produced, among other shows, True Detective, liked the pilot script that he and Barrodale recently wrote for a TV adaptation of How to Sell. Sony bought the rights to the book after it came out. For a while, it looked like Showtime was going to do a series, but that network finally passed.

“I am more of a movie person, so I would rather see it as a movie,” Martin said. “But it’s far more lucrative as a writer if your book becomes a TV show. As a rule, authors don’t get much from movies made from their books, although it calls attention to the book, which is good for sales. In TV, even if you’re just the author and not a show writer, you get sort of an astonishing amount of money.”

Martin has been struggling for the better part of the past five years on what he views as a capital-b Big follow-up novel to How to Sell — Bad Sex being more of a quick detour, almost a novella — called The Primitive. It’s about a mother who murders her child. “I’ve been finding the heart of it very slowly,” Martin said. “It’s about feeling the need to destroy yourself but also the attempt to recognize that that’s not a good idea — wrestling with self-destruction.”

I asked what he was struggling with most about the book.

“It annoys Amie when I say this, but I actually think being hungover when writing was helpful,” Martin said. “Don’t get me wrong: My sobriety is more important to me than my writing. But I think being hungover made it easy for me to concentrate. My brain had a little more energy. And I wrote Bad Sex sober, but I wrote that years ago when I was so newly sober that I still felt hungover in a way. So I think that that’s partially why Love and Lies took so long to finish and what’s taking so long on The Primitive.”

He went on: “The self-destructive instinct — I still have it. I think lots of artists and writers have it. But I do feel like I’ve finally reached a place where I have learned to appreciate simple things: a nice, comfortable home with my wife; happy children; work that I care about; occasional travel, maybe even on a magazine’s dime. I’m so sick of the rest of the stuff. I got sick of it 10 years ago, actually. But it took a long time to get out of my system.”