Glen David Gold
Glen David Gold is the author of Carter Beats the Devil (Hyperion, 2001), a historical novel about Charles Carter, a real-life San Francisco stage magician who performs for President Warren Harding on the evening of Harding's mysterious death. It has been translated into 14 languages.
His next novel, Sunnyside (Knopf, 2009), is a dark romp concerning Charlie Chaplin's rise to fame during World War I and its parallels with America's embrace of its part on the world stage.
His most recent book is a memoir, I Will Be Complete (Knopf, 2018). About it, Darin Strauss (Half a Life, Chang and Eng) writes, "“I Will Be Complete is the best memoir I’ve read in years. It’s likely the best memoir published in years."
Gold's short stories have appeared in a number of issues of McSweeney's. He has also published fiction, essays, memoir and reviews in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Playboy, Wired and Zyzzyva.
Gold wrote a single 1997 episode of the cartoon show Hey Arnold. He has also ventured into comic books, including The Spirit, featuring artwork by Eduardo Risso, and The Escapist, with artwork by Gene Colan. He has written extensively about comics creator Jack Kirby, most notably for the Masters of American Comics and Comic Book Apocalypse museum show catalogues.
More recently, Gold co-wrote episodes of the stage show The Thrilling Adventure Hour and the podcast Welcome to Night Vale. He lives in Los Angeles not with but adjacent to his girlfriend, in a duplex, the logistics of which are addressed in a 2018 Modern Love column for The New York Times.
“Faith was a choice. So, it followed, was wonder.”
“Oh, dear God, you don't actually have a brain, do you, it's more a filigreed spiderweb, with little chambers in it where trained monkeys play the pipe organ.”
“We know how ninety-nine percent of the universe works," he told Carter shortly after they met, "and that's the clockworks, that's what we build with. But the other one percent makes the clockworks wind down. That's inertia. No one knows how that works, but it does. It's that one percent mystery that's the way of our maker. Put everything together, energy and inertia, the explicable and the inexplicable, and that's how you and I make our living.”
“There were never moments in your life when you actually saw something end, for whether you knew it or not something else was always flowering. Never a disappearance, always a transformation.”
“His curse in life was to be attracted to people who understood him.”
“In his youth, [he] had believed everything was possible. Then in grief, he believed everything was impossible. And now. . . he felt that when you had lived enough of your life, there was no difference between the two.”
“He felt people were never intentionally beastly or malicious, but they were pompous and foolish; awful decisions were made by men divorced from their own humanity.”