FOR ADULTS, BOYS, GIRLS, COLOR TO RELAX

My first book came out in paperback today. I will always think of it as being called We Never Free a Mind Once It's Reached a Certain Age-- the way Paul Thomas Anderson still refers to Hard Eight, fuck-you-itively, as Sydney, which was his original title-- but you may know it by its official title, which is Keanu Reeves: Most Triumphant– The Movies and Meaning of an Irrepressible Icon. I don't love that title but I like that it has both a colon and an M-dash in it, just like John Wick: Chapter 3– Parabellum. Most Triumphant and everything after that was my compromise title, and then they added Keanu's name, ostensibly for SEO reasons, so I take a perverse told-you-so pride in the fact that if you go to Amazon and search "Keanu Reeves" in the books department my book is still only the fourth thing that comes up, after a book of 50 Keanu-derived kindness aphorisms from the author of Pocket Frida Kahlo Wisdom, a collection of Keanu and Matt Kindt's very cool comics series BRZRKR, and a Keanu coloring book ("For Adults, Boys, Girls Color to Relax.") Maybe if we'd called it Keanu Reeves: Keanu Reeves– The Keanu, Reeves, and Keanu Reeves of Keanu Reeves we'd have moved the needle. I should point out that my Keanu book features dozens of amazing illustrations by the great Eoin Coveney and as they are all in black-and-white you can certainly color them to relax, if that's what you need to do.

The first thing I wrote that made it into the final version of this book was the thing about Keanu killing Charles Bronson in the 1986 made-for-HBO film Act of Vengeance, which I wrote on March 16, 2020, which I think of as the first true Monday of Covid. But when I pulled out the notebooks for some process stuff to include here I realized I'd actually drawn this thematic map almost exactly two months earlier, in January.

I never got around to writing about Keanu's Between Two Ferns and I forget why Mulholland Dr is on there– but a Mulholland quote ended up being one of the epigrams in the Steely Dan book, so clearly I'm just determined to shoehorn that movie into everything one way or another.

At some point last year I was pretty fired up to write a new, special-to-the-paperback chapter about The Matrix Resurrections– a movie that seemed, when I saw it, to be sort of uncannily in conversation with certain ideas I'd put forth in the book about the existential dilemma facing Keanu Reeves– but when I went to actually write that chapter I realized I'd already said everything important I had to say about it here.

So if you read the book in 2022 when it came out in hardcover, it’s exactly the same book you read back then, except the paperback is yellow, whereas the hardcover was more of a sunset-y orangey-pink, with different type and Eoin Coveney illustration. (Shout out to Eoin and Diane Shaw at Abrams; every iteration of this book has looked incredible.) The book-meat inside is literally exactly the same as the hardcover version— the interior pages of the paperback editions were harvested from surplus copies of the hardback. It’s what’s known in the trade as a “strip and rebind.” This phrase is one of the things I learned in the process of putting this book out.

I also learned that if you put a book out at the are-we-doing-things-in-public-again phase of a pandemic and wait until like a month before it comes out to think about how to promote it and end up doing only one in-person event (thanks Amy) and one virtual thing (thanks Naomi) and tweet about it once or twice and then kind of let the universe decide what’s going to happen, one of the things that happens is your publisher ends up with a whole bunch of extra copies of your book that they can strip and rebind when it’s time to make the paperback.

I’ve gotten two royalty statements and the first one basically said, in numbers, “This did pretty good, given everything you didn’t do to promote it” and the second one said “Well, actually, it turns out this almost did pretty good,” which I’m still taking as a win, given the aforementioned not-really-trying. I probably should have sent it out to some people or gone on a podcast or something.

Somebody pointed out that even though it might seem tacky or arrogant to pull every promotional lever available to you and generally stomp around for months like BookZilla trampling the city when your book comes out, it’s actually way more arrogant to not do that work, because you’re assuming your thing is so good that the world is just going to find it, and I kind of wish I’d read that sooner. But when the book came out I was busy writing The Big Hit Show (still available here or wherever you get your podcasts!) and Quantum Criminals (which you can preorder now from Amazon or the independent bookseller of your choice– I know I said last week you could buy it from UT, but go with Bezos or an indie if you're gonna do it now, we're trying to get certain numbers up) and also I was tired and I didn’t want to think about the Keanu book for a while.

I don’t know, man— Spielberg had already gone home by the time they blew the shark up.

Anyway: Please consider buying the Keanu book in paperback. It is a series of fever-dreamish close readings of films by one of our most important living artists, and as weird as I'm always going to feel about it, I'm happy and a little bit surprised that Abrams put out a book this weird (thanks, Shannon) and didn't object too strenuously to anything other than the original title– plus, if I’m reading this royalty statement correctly which is probably not the case, we're a mere $22,000 away from recouping.

On June 26, 2022, the actor and artist Anna Abhau Elliott delivered a meditation about Keanu during Sunday services at a Unitarian Universalist church in Spartanburg, Tennessee. She talked a little bit about Most Triumphant as a way into some broader ideas about Keanu and how his work portrays the spiritual journey and the cycle of suffering. I think her talk is still the best and most thoughtful review this book has received; it says everything I was trying to say and then goes beyond me. The actual Keanu talk begins here– just past the 36-minute mark, if that link doesn't take you straight there– but if you've got time I recommend starting around 5:45. This service took place less than 48 hours after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and what the UUCS ministers say to the congregation at 5:45 is a response to that; what Sydney McMath plays and sings at the 10-minute mark is also a response, and in context, every time she gets to "Several federal men..." it takes the breath out of my lungs.

Grateful-- beyond my ability to unselfdeprecatingly express things-- to Anna, and to everybody else who read this book, whether you told a congregation about it or kept it to yourself.