Well, Christ, if I’m not going to stop listening to Led Zeppelin because of Jimmy Page grooming that one girl, I guess Cormac gets a pass too....oh screw it. I can’t even pretend to moral consistency about this stuff. I feel like letting him off because I liked the guy, that’s all.

It was an interesting article, all right, and yes the story does seem like one of Cormac’s own plots.
Certainly I had heard about some of his crappier adventures being married, Jennifer Winkley, who was half Cormac’s age, hid a gun in her vagina for God’s sake, although it was after he divorced her in 2006. So no, it’s not that surprising.

The story of their meeting reminds me of Llewellyn Moss meeting that girl at the hotel in No Country For Old Men, the one later seen dead in the pool.

It isn’t very good to think about anything from Cormac’s real life inspiring The Counsellor, for God’s sake. Yuck.

It makes perfect sense to think that this girl is who we’re looking at on those last two book covers, though.

This paragraph is what I’m going to remember most:

“Santa Fe killed the Cormac I knew. He gained fame, wealth, and fancy superficial friends. He turned his back on his old friends like Jimmy Long (J-Bone) and Billy Kidwell. They were left to die, forgotten and alone. He lost much of his compassion and kindness. As the Institute crowd claimed more of his time, he struggled to write. Couldn’t write. How could he? He’d stifled or killed that which inspired him. The advance for The Passenger was spent. He was obligated. These last many years he has taken up drinking again. Living in majestic splendor but enjoying none of it. Surrounded by junk and the clutter of a lifetime. Haunted.”

This does in some ways remind me of a rich version of the protagonist of The Passenger who is in love with his dead sister and who just wanders through the waste of his life until the book just ends (and who thinks the FBI is after him, just like Cormac, arrrgh.) This of course is fairly sad, I thought the recongition he was getting because of NCFOM and The Road, plus the classic status increasingly accorded to Blood Meridian and Suttree (and right around the time I started reading his work) but I guess all that Hollywood recognition and accordance from his fellow writers wasn’t going to shore up the pain from his divorce to Winkley which was in 2006. I suppose his work did decline a bit after 2006, too–The Counsellor sucked and the last two novels were just okay. So yes I guess sadly I can sort of believe that “Santa Fe killed him”…after all, those scientists he talked too all the time had to have been a pretty damn bleak bunch, but I’d already read a bunch of that in things like his Rolling Stone interview.

George Starostin met him a couple times in Santa Fe, BTW.

Reading this is reminding me of something I read on Reddit and had to look up using other sources a couple days ago, the sadder aspects of Cormac’s final years may be like what David Lynch is going through right now–you may know that he has emphysema from a lifetime of smoking, as he gleefully announced it on social media a couple weeks back, but he’s also now urging people to quit smoking because he can barely make it across a room:

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/nov/15/david-lynch-emphysema-diagnosis-urges-smokers-to-quit

So he’s in terrible pain right now, and oh yeah, his much younger wife dumped him last year and I think ran off with their kid, which was what I stumbled upon on Reddit–it was a thread about celebrities who aren’t very good parents, and some people have accused him of being sort of distant towards his kids (he did after all make Eraserhead based on his own anxiety about becoming a father, right?)