Birthday for The Entertainer

Author John Grisham, who turns 53 today, would likely be the first to say he isn’t writing for legacy. And it’s quite possible the literary criticism heaped on his mega-selling work doesn’t bother him that much, nor make a dent in his paychecks (reportedly $9 million last year alone). In a recent interview with AP, he says he’s more concerned with the entertainment value of his work than with his own place in history:

“I’m not sure where that line goes between literature and popular fiction,” the mega-selling author says. “I can assure you I don’t take myself serious enough to think I'm writing literary fiction and stuff that’s going to be remembered in 50 years. I’m not going to be here in 50 years; I don’t care if I’m remembered or not. It’s pure entertainment.”

In the same piece, Grisham admits to being an avid -- though erratic -- reader as well as a collector of books and he loves “to buy books. Love to stack ‘em up in the house. We’ve got a million books in the house.”

And though he doesn’t have to work as hard at it now, he loves to make books, too. Grisham says that, early in his second career as a writer, while still lawyering full time, he was very disciplined with regard to his fiction.

When he first started writing, Grisham says, he had “these little rituals that were silly and brutal but very important.”

“The alarm clock would go off at 5, and I’d jump in the shower. My office was 5 minutes away. And I had to be at my desk, at my office, with the first cup of coffee, a legal pad and write the first word at 5:30, five days a week.”

His goal: to write a page every day. Sometimes that would take 10 minutes, sometimes an hour; ofttimes he would write for two hours before he had to turn to his job as a lawyer, which he never especially enjoyed. In the Mississippi Legislature, there were “enormous amounts of wasted time” that would give him the opportunity to write.

“So I was very disciplined about it,” he says, then quickly concedes he doesn’t have such discipline now: “I don’t have to.”

Even so, the books keep coming. The Appeal (Doubleday), Grisham’s 22nd book and 21st novel, went on sale at the end of January.

The AP piece runs in the International Herald Tribune today and it’s here.