Meet Percival Everett: 5 novels that showcase the L.A. writer’s enigmatic style
Percival Everett
In the 1980s, Percival Everett did a lot of traveling. After years of writing for newspapers, magazines, and the airwaves, he moved to Australia with his family so that his wife, Janet, and their kids could live and work in the great outdoors. But while his work in London, Sydney, and Sydney again made Everett famous, there was a book in his suitcase that was still waiting to get out: The Drought. No matter how many times he said no to publishing, another publisher had asked Everett to send a finished manuscript. He declined.
“I was getting sick of turning down every publisher who wanted to publish my work,” says Everett. “It would just keep getting worse and worse.”
A decade later, his wife was gone, and Everett was living in a rented house in Culver City, California (where he had lived for only a few months in high school), with his two young daughters. He had never felt that he was in much more than debt when he got his first job. It was a temp gig for ten months and a half after the publication of the novel that would change his life, Losing My Grip. Everett had been teaching English around the country for many years, and he was now in his 40s and struggling to pay the cost of the house, his daughters’ education, and his two dogs. Then, Everett wrote a chapter of Losing My Grip and sent it off to Simon & Schuster.
While Everett says he sent a copy to Simon & Schuster in the late summer of 2014, a version of the story had already been published as a limited-edition, paperback original in March by Simon & Schuster. A few months later, Simon & Schuster would publish Everett’s second book, A Year With Cheesecake: The Journal of a Middle-Aged Novelist, in the United Kingdom. It was in that same year that Everett sold his house, packed up his belongings and moved to Los
