He writes intimately about it, but he also touches on the death of his father, when he was 9, and the subsequent search for father figures on the court. Beller played basketball on teams from middle school through college and has covered the sport as a journalist. “Lost in the Game” is an illuminating and unexpectedly poignant collection of essays, traversing the worlds of both professional basketball and pickup games. I found myself softening to him with every turning page. What I thought I knew of him from our single, long-ago exchange didn’t come through in the writing, where Beller is both self-reflective and sharply observant, heartfelt and magnanimous. I know next to nothing about basketball, but I love narrative nonfiction. In a role-reversed foreshadowing of my profile encounter, the mega-rock stars had given Beller all kinds of attitude while he, the young journalist, earnestly tried to report the story. Beller had spent time with brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher of the band Oasis several years earlier while writing a memorable 1997 cover story for Spin magazine. He was also still feeling the influence of the Gallagher brothers, he said. Bingham had been publisher of the now-defunct Open City Magazine, which Beller had co-founded with Daniel Pinchbeck in 1990. He’d been struggling, he said, after the sudden death of his close friend, Robert Bingham, when we met. His apology came via an email to my Times colleague, an acquaintance of his, and he linked to the piece I’d written, which he said he wanted to explain. Beller will be in town this week to promote 2022’s “ Lost In The Game: A Book About Basketball.” His fifth book is part memoir, part journalism and part essayistic exploration of the sport. His academic bio says that his work, while spanning genres, is bound by an interest in “the dynamics of relationships,” as well as “the nature and effect of time.” So I found his two-decades-late apology curious, but oddly fitting. Why am I rehashing all this? Because Beller reached out to me last week - 23 years later - to apologize.īeller is director of creative writing at Tulane University. I have no idea why, but I also remember the song that was lodged in my head as I waited, an old Bangles earworm my then-husband had included in a mix of oldies he’d burned onto a CD for me: “Manic Monday.” Beller didn’t show up right away for our interview, and I, a newbie journalist working on one of my first big profiles, sat in a booth, with his book on my lap, for an hour and a half. It was so long ago that I didn’t yet have a cellphone. We met (eventually - more on that later) at the Hollywood Hills Coffee Shop, on Franklin Boulevard under the looming Hollywood sign. He didn’t know this, but I was going through a rough time personally - headed toward a divorce. The year was 2000.īeller was on a national book tour for his debut novel, “ The Sleep-Over Artist.” I didn’t know this, but he was going through a rough time personally. Once, long ago, in the now-shuttered offices of LA Weekly on Sunset Boulevard, I was assigned to profile a young, hip writer named Thomas Beller.
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