I quit smoking years ago and my doctor forbids me to drink. “What else would I be doing?,” he asked me during our visit, with a grin, adding, “I can’t hunt or fish or climb mountains or travel or court women anymore. And I have no shame.” Nichols turned 81 last July. Right up until today when I’m six months past my eightieth birthday. 259), Nichols confides, “Guess what? During my sixties and seventies I continued writing books. Or he will just read and research for his current projects. He writes all night in the cool dark, sleeps late during the morning and early afternoon and may greet the rare visitor, a watchful neighbor or his devoted daughter as the day wanes. When I visited with John Nichols at his Taos home in late September 2021, he was working on final proofs for this book while also chipping away at another work or two. Which forms the epigraph to this book: “A forty-dollar bet was lyin’ on the floor/And myīuddy’s point was nine /Then the police broke down the door-But I got mine.” Song, which Nichols often used to sing in Taos’s sadly now-closed Brodsky Bookstore and Nichols’s quasi-piratical attitude towards life is succinctly summed up in his favorite blues. Evidence The Sterile Cuckoo, The Milagro Beanfield War, Nirvana Blues, American Blood, The Empanada Brotherhood, and more than 15 additional titles culminating (so far) in this touching, hilarious and candid volume, I Got Mine.Īt root, this autobiographical tome is a book of hard-bitten, determined philosophy.

(The subtitle is drawn from a glib reviewer’s wisecrack some years back that both amused and hurt Nichols.) Anyone who has read John Nichols’s novels and essays or seen the films based on his screenplays knows that he is a major American writer, most certainly top-shelf not midlist. Funny, but with a bittersweet edge to it.

Published book-length memoir is typical Nichols. The sardonic, self-effacing sub-title of Taos-based author John Treadwell Nichols’s just.

The milagro beanfield war novel