IN THE MID-1990s, Scott Heim was everywhere. The boyishly handsome poet and fiction writer from Hutchinson, Kan., had a debut novel, "Mysterious Skin," major reviewers praised as groundbreaking and the arrival of an important new voice. His publisher, thrilled with the trifecta of critical acclaim, brisk sales, and swirling controversy over the book's subject matter (recovered memories, alien abduction, and child sexual abuse, all of which were "hot" in that heyday of daytime talk), was grooming him to be the next great American writer. William S. Burroughs invited him to dinner. Interview magazine splashed shirtless young-Capote-esque photos of him across its pages. It was the kind of success - exposure? - every writer longs to experience. Heim read to packed bookstores coast to coast. He received letters from readers moved by his harrowing story. He was in his late 20s, flush with royalties, and living comfortably in New York City, eager to build on his auspicious start.
Heim was under intense pressure to follow "Mysterious Skin" with another stunner, and soon. He wrote and published his second novel, "In Awe," in a frenzied blur. Supremely confident in its literary merit and the efficacy of HarperCollins, the author expected the same attention and praise he had received just two years before. Instead, the few reviews "In Awe" received were mostly negative or, at best, puzzled. Critics took a nasty tone, as if personally insulted. What had become of the accessible horror, the controlled wildness, the tenuous but satisfying redemption of "Mysterious Skin"? Was the author a one-hit wunderkind, like so many before him? His future as a writer suddenly in doubt, Heim, wounded, disappeared.
For the past 10 years, Scott Heim's fans have counted him among the missing. While "Mysterious Skin" has continued to flourish - adapted into a play in 2003, and then, in 2004, a smash indie film - the author has battled a host of demons. This month, he emerges with a new novel titled, aptly, "We Disappear."
IDEAS: Scott Heim, where have you been?
HEIM: After "In Awe" knocked me to the ground, I moved to London, and then my mom got sick, and I didn't have a job, and I was addicted to crystal meth. I'd started a new novel in 1998 - a horror/mystery about a father of two boys who murders a kid and buries her in a peach orchard - but during this group of years I didn't work on it much. The few times I did try to pick it up, the story would change. It went through 10 distinct stages, and at each stage the characters got closer and closer to me and my mom. Eventually I started using our real names. But the book is not a memoir. The entire experience of her death and my addiction was so painful, I couldn't write it as literal truth. I needed the distance that a novel allows. It was the only way I could process what was happening to us.
IDEAS: What is it about writing that makes it so cathartic? Is it that creating something new - often something beautiful - out of tragedy gives that tragedy some meaning, saves it from uselessness?
HEIM: It's that transmutation, yes. Honestly, how do people live without it? I can't imagine what I'd do if I didn't have writing as an outlet to make sense of what's happened to me. I hate the act itself, of trudging over the same ground with words, but I've spent the last 15 years doing it, and I never would have survived without it.
IDEAS: "We Disappear" takes place during the last few months of Donna's life, when Scott moves to Kansas to live with her. Were you writing during that difficult time?
HEIM: What ended up being the published version was written afterward. My mom was in and out of remission for a while, but in the middle of October 2003, I found out she only had until Christmas. For the first time in many years, I had a sense of purpose: to get to know her, to learn about her life, her past. She'd had a difficult childhood, her parents were awful to her; I needed her to tell me about it all finally. I had all these plans for us.
But by the time I got to Kansas, she was too sick to do much of anything. She could barely talk. I knew that writing the scene of her death would be difficult, but it was actually much harder to write the happier scenes, when Donna was able to express herself, to make jokes and involve Scott in her obsessions and mysteries. Like me, she loved true crime stories; she was fascinated by the possibility that what you thought was your past, what was most real in your memory, might not have happened at all.
IDEAS: Which, I'm guessing, is why "We Disappear" blurs novel and memoir. That blur honors Donna's and Scott's obsessions with the tension between the real and the imagined. Readers will wonder what part, if any, crystal meth played in this.
HEIM: In the novel, Scott's on drugs while his mom is dying, but in real life I'd quit by then. The drug didn't do anything for me anymore. It was just keeping me alive. It wasn't about pleasure; it was just obliterating the sadness. You don't write when you're on drugs because the last thing you want is to be alone. Crystal meth was erasing me, and the deeper I got I saw only three outcomes: death, prison, or recovery.
IDEAS: So you made the conscious choice to recover?
HEIM: If I hadn't moved to Boston, I'd still be a drug addict, and "We Disappear" wouldn't exist. The literary scene in New York is more cutthroat, and I knew too many dealers. The writers I've met in Boston have supported me. After I left Kansas the final time, I told myself: I can't bring my mom back, but I can finish this book for her.
For Heim's upcoming readings: harpercollins.com/Author/Tour.aspx?authorID=4375
Christopher Castellani is the author of two novels and the artistic director of Grub Street Writers.
rising
falling 