Today I learned that counterculture novelist (though he would have cringed at the description) Tom Robbins has died. I learned it because a bunch of folks quoted an interview I did with him back in 2000. I returned to that piece today and read the interview. It was good. But it also missed some notes. He was brilliant, Robbins was. And it was difficult — then as now — to do him justice.
So the first thing I’d like to correct is something I didn’t at the time understand. I began the article with this (in retrospect longish) paragraph:
Though he writes as eloquently on the topic of paradox as he does everything else he’s tackled, Tom Robbins is himself a study in contradictions. Perhaps even a studied study. A notoriously private man who guards his personal life jealously, he nonetheless accepts book tours and grants interviews at a place in his career when — let’s face it — he really doesn’t have to. And though he claims to love the coldish, wetish, clammyishness of the Pacific Northwestern United States where he and his wife Alexa make their home, throughout our interview in a dimly lit inside space with a clam aspic-type day happening outside, he never removed his sunglasses. Declining, even, when requested to do so for photos. (Though, in truth, this whole sunglass episode might have less to do with sun and more to do with other considerations. Robbins, after all, turns 64 this year. And while I can report that, with sunglasses in place, he evidences a youthful and healthy glow, I have no idea what story his eyes might tell.)
After the piece was published in June of 2000, I was ashamed to learn from his Vancouver publicist of the time that he was wearing sunglasses during our interview not for the reasons of deliberate bravado or the vanity that I imagined and implied, but because he was having some type of genuine medical eye issue at the time. I’ve Googled and haven’t found confirmation of that and, as it turned out, the Vancouver publicist in question wasn’t the most reliable source of information, but — for what it’s worth — for many years I felt crappy about maligning him in that way. Knowing him even a little though, that probably would have amused him, too.
A lot amused him. A lot. “To say that you can’t take life seriously and that life shouldn’t be taken seriously is not to say that life is trivial or frivolous,” he told me on that long ago clamish day. “Quite the contrary. There’s nothing the least bit frivolous about the playful nature of the universe. Playfulness at a fully conscious level is extremely profound. In fact there is nothing more profound. Wit and playfulness are dreadfully serious transcendence of evil.”
These long looks at the world was what so endeared Robbins to his legions of fans, including, if rumor is to be believed, the late Elvis Presley.
The story was, Robbins told me, that Presley “got up in the middle of the night and said: I’m gonna go take a read. And went to the bathroom. And when he was found, the book beside him on the bathroom floor was a book about the discovery of the mummified body of Christ in the Vatican. Well, I don’t know of any other novels about the discovery of the mummified body of Christ in the Vatican, so it stood to reason that it was Another Roadside Attraction.”
At least part of Robbins’ success was due to the joy he brought to his life and to his work.
“My personal motto has always been: Joy in spite of everything. Not just [mindless] joy, but joy in spite of everything. Recognizing the inequities and the suffering and the corruption and all that, but refusing to let it rain on my parade. And I advocate this to other people.”
He advocated that joy in eight novels, a novella and a couple of works of non-fiction, including 2014’s autobiography, Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life. The novels include Another Roadside Attraction (1971), Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976); Jitterbug Perfume (1984); Skinny Legs and All (1990) and others.
Robbins died February 9, 2025 at his home in La Conner, Washington. As the New York Times remembers, “Robbins was best known for his absurdist, irreverent novels, which inspired a devoted cult following and included numerous bestsellers. While his work was rooted in 1960s counterculture, he had a devoted readership that spanned generations.”
We bow our heads. ◊
Linda L. Richards is the editor of January Magazine. You can read her 2000 interview with Tom Robbins here.
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