Gary Lippman - I Wish, Therefore I Am

I Wish, Therefore I Am or, This Here is a List of Humble Appeals to Dame Fortune

Read It and Own It

**Comic, tragic, erotic, whimsical, and profound, I Wish, Therefore I Am is a tonic for these times.**

“We’re composed of wishes as thoroughly as we’re composed of water.” So writes Gary Lippman in his latest book, a “literary wish list” that blends experimental memoir, surrealist adventure, and self-help meditation into one unforgettable ride.

I Wish, Therefore I Am is a mosaic of a singular American lifetime’s worth of desires—and how those desires collide with a cast of recurring characters: a band of evil ninjas, a mysterious black-clad vagabond, and the ancient goddess of destiny herself, Dame Fortune.

The wishes in this book range from the fantastical to the deeply personal, invoking winged dinosaurs, whirling dervishes, the Rolling Stones, African proverbs, Amelia Earhart, Civil War-era missiles, Tarot cards, pirates, psychoanalysts, and a pair of eternally rolling dice—and that’s just in the first six pages.

I Wish, Therefore I Am Praise

JOAN JULIET BUCK

Gary Lippman’s generously discursive multiverse of a novel tackles every sized question about luck, fate, and wishes. It’s a panoramic ride through stories and confession, with side trips to Borges, Captain Beefheart, William Blake, and hilarious country-and-western song titles. With I Wish, Therefore I Am, Lippman has unleashed a liberating new genre.
DANNY FIELDS
JONATHAN SHAW
PATRICIA MARX
EUGENE HUTZ (GOGOL BORDELLO)

Anything Gary Lippman writes is going to be infused with playful wit, topsy-turvy observations, and sublime streaks of imagination—but I Wish, Therefore I Am is exceptionally so. Lippman’s predisposition to unbury every possible source of joy, however small and however well-hidden in the rough, makes the author a Don Quixote on a bliss crusade. Plus, damn, this motherfucka can spell!

Q & A with Gary

What piece of clothing tells the most interesting story about your life?

Am I superstitious? “Not one bit,” says my would-be rationalist self. But don’t believe it. I’ve gathered around me many good luck charms down the decades, and I’m most attached to my collection of t-shirts which bear on their front sides the numeral eight. I fetishize this number because I was born on the eighth day of the eighth month—but also because in China they consider eight to be the most fortunate of numerals. (You bet I make sure to boast about my birthday to every Chinese person I meet.)
I acquired my eight-themed t-shirts in a notable way one balmy night in 2019 while I was on vacation in Honolulu. Strolling down a street near Waikiki Beach, I noticed an apron in the window of a clothing store, an apron emblazoned with a big fat “8.” Needless to say, I rushed into the store and bought that apron (which was fortunately quite affordable). I told the cashier that I had the hots for the numeral eight. Then I asked him if his shop featured any other eight-related items. He looked at me strangely. So strangely that I asked him what was wrong.
“Nothing,” he said. “But have you taken a look around here?”
I swung around to regard the rest of the large store. Every single item for sale—not only aprons, but t-shirts, coffee cups, key chains, even vibrators, were decorated with the number I find most magical. Here was my numerological Shangri La! Feeling almost as happy as I had the day I first met my wife, superstitious me began shopping in earnest.
What’s the oddest thing a reader has ever asked you?

I haven’t been asked anything especially odd by readers of my books. Nothing odd from journalists who have interviewed me, either. But I did find it quite odd when a real-live person whom I’d mentioned in my first novel—a total stranger—showed up at my reading of said novel at the West Hollywood store Book Soup. I had not known that Cami Sebring, the ex-wife of the celebrity hairstylist / Manson Family homicide victim Jay Sebring, still walked among us, much less that she might come to meet the author of a book about Sharon Tate (who was Jay’s ex-girlfriend and fellow victim). Still, I got over the oddness of meeting Cami pretty quickly, found her delightful, and am happy to report that she, an inhabitant of my first work of fiction, is now my flesh-and-blood friend.
Have you ever experienced Imposter Syndrome?

Not only have I experienced Imposter Syndrome, I still experience it on a daily basis, and so keenly do I feel it that my Imposter Syndrome has its own Imposter Syndrome. According to psychotherapists worldwide, the route to sanity lies in feeling authentic, and the sub-routes by which to get there can be found in “letting go,” in “saying ‘Fuck it’ to everything,” in “daring to be average” and “bashing on regardless.” Still, our navigation of those emotional roadways is easier said than done. And what if all those smarty-pants therapists are themselves imposters?
Are there particular films that have influenced your writing?

Ordinarily when asked which film has most influenced my writing, I cite Harold and Maude as well as the whimsically happy-sad movies that it engendered: Amelie, Juno, and so forth. (Speaking more specifically, Roman Polanski’s The Tenant was the direct progenitor of my first novel, while the Canadian picture Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould got me cooking with my second book, which was a collection of one-sentence-long stories.)
Now that I think of it, a different movie may have influenced my work, and influenced my life, even more than has Harold and Maude. It was a Peter Sellers comedy entitled The Bobo. Why the title? I can’t tell you, because I haven’t seen the film since I was four years old and my mother brought me to see it in a cinema while we were on vacation somewhere. I don’t remember where that “somewhere” was, and all I remember about The Bobo is that Sellers was dressed at one point in a matador’s suit of lights with his face and hands—probably his whole body—dyed a deep shade of blue.
Why the costume? Why the blue skin? Again, I’m clueless, but that matador thing and that blue skin thing were so weird that they blew my four-year-old mind, blew it quite profoundly. Life, I realized while watching The Bobo, is weirder than anything my already-kooky mind could imagine. Frighteningly, yet also deliciously, weirder. And that childhood day I looked forward to growing up into a world which would allow me to access all the frightening yet delicious weirdness.
If you could create a museum exhibition, what would be the theme?

In my new novel, I Wish, Therefore I Am, my protagonist imagines faithfully reconstructing the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World on the grounds of his grade school playground. That’s a museum-grade exhibition I’d pay to see! But no museum exhibit I could dream up can ever rival the stuff they’ve got on display at Los Angeles’s Museum of Jurassic Technology, which is one of my favorite places in the so-called City of Angels. To learn about this extraordinary place, I recommend reading the book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Wechsler. Although the author has been less than friendly to me each time I’ve met him through our mutual friends, I bear him no grudge; maybe Wechsler could perceive my Imposter Syndrome and simply wished to keep clear of it.
The creative architect of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, a brilliant and enigmatic man named David Wilson, tends not to engage with the visitors to his marvelous creation. Even so, he does make surprise appearances there. One sun-splashed day while my wife and I drank tea in the rooftop garden at the museum, I recognized Wilson seated alone. To my delight, he was playing a lute. Not wanting to disturb the man, yet nevertheless eager to praise him, I turned to my wife and said loud enough for him to hear me (he had just put down his instrument), “I sure wish Mr. Wilson was around right now so that I could tell him how fabulous I consider this museum of his!”
Needless to say, Wilson looked surprised. It was, fortunately, the pleased kind of “surprised.” When he came over to say hello, my wife told him how she had attached to the collar of her beloved dog Egon a porcelain cosmonaut figure which we had bought in the museum gift shop some years before. (The cosmonaut was associated with the Soviet space dog Laika, who’d been the subject of a Jurassic Technology exhibit.) Upon Egon’s death died, that porcelain figure got cremated along with the rest of my wife’s sweet canine. Wilson seemed touched to hear that an item from his gift shop had personally meant so much to us, and we felt touched that he felt touched, and the sun kept shining down on the three of us until, eventually, as it must, down that sun went.