A Guide to Pre-Ordering My Upcoming Book, “Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride”

And there’s a contest to enter too!

When my book Are We Winning? came out in 2010, the writer Chuck Klosterman provided me with a blurb I still chuckle about today:

Are We Winning? has got to be the best book about Midwestern fatherhood ever written by a childless man in Brooklyn.

There are many pivot points in a person’s life — marriages, divorces, funerals, the moment you realize you can only name, like, four bands at Lollapalooza — but if you’re a parent, you know that nothing is more seismic than when your first child is born. Everything that happened before then, stuff that seemed pretty freaking important at the time, immediately becomes prologue — mere backstory for the role you’ll be playing the rest of your life. Your life shifts, instantly, from something that belonged to you, in which you were the main character, into a quest in which you have a sole motivation: Keep this person safe and make their life a good one. I remember, the morning my first son William was born, talking to my mother on the phone. She told me, “Isn’t it amazing, how this thing that didn’t exist four hours ago is suddenly the most important thing in the world? How much you already love it?” There hasn’t been a day since, including the day William got a little brother whom I felt the exact same way about, that has been any less true. It’s all that matters — just like that.

That I once wrote a whole book about parenthood solely from the perspective of a son, without being a father myself, was part of Are We Winning?’s appeal, I hope. Part of the point of that book, which is really an ode to my own dad and the transcendent bonding power of sports itself, was that I wasn’t a father, that I was childless well into my thirties and thus felt much more like a son than an actual adult … but also about knowing that balance was about to flip, and soon. William was born 18 months after Are We Winning? came out, and (largely because, uh, no one bought Are We Winning?) I wouldn’t write another book for 10 years, not until How Lucky. Suffice it to say, a lot happened in those 10 years.

But it was inevitable that I would end up writing a book about parenthood after becoming an actual parent. That book is Lloyd…