JE: Having grown up in punk bands in early 80s Seattle, and later being intimately involved in the sound and the scene that would be dubbed grunge in the early 90s, I was excited about six months ago when I received Tyler Mcmahon’s How the Mistakes were Made from St. Martin’s, which chronicles the rise and fall of a rock and roll band in 90s Seattle. I knew going into this novel that if McMahon hit any false notes, I’d hear them loud and clear. But guess what? He didn’t. I quickly devoured The Mistakes, and since I relish the opportunity to repeat myself, briefly, this is what I had to say: With the velocity and conviction and frenetic pace of a punk anthem, McMahon has captured perfectly the life cycle of a rock and roll band in all its exhilarating and destructive glory. How the Mistakes Were Made is fast, furious, and un-put-downable.

Here is Tyler’s When We Fell in Love post:

Like many bookish college students, I took my first writing workshop with a set of inflated and baseless expectations. I must’ve thought I’d be congratulated on a body of work that didn’t exist, encouraged for talent that had never manifested itself. Things didn’t go according to those nebulous plans.

My student-writer peers were interested mainly in mobster fantasies and Christian parables. The teacher was accepted into law school in the early weeks of the semester and declared that there was no future in fiction writing. The voice I’d been hoping discover never quite materialized. Even the textbook—an anthology of crisp, onionskin pages—felt dense and foreign when I propped it on my chest to read.

Then one day, the same teacher dropped upon my desk a Xerox copy of a short story called “Emergency” by a writer I’d never heard of. Halfway through reading it, I felt as if I were having some kind of out-of-body experience. This story combined the wisdom of the Modern novelists I admired with the dark humor of the Monty Python and Leslie Nielsen movies I was addicted to. The sentences themselves had the puzzling cadence of old folk songs. It felt to me as if fiction had suddenly shifted from black and white into Technicolor.

Amidst the pleasure, I remember feeling a twinge of resentment toward the teacher who’d turned me on to this story—as though she’d somehow usurped a piece of my individuality before I’d gotten the chance to discover it for myself.

Shortly thereafter I went to the campus library, sifted through the stacks, and found a jacketless hardcover of Jesus’ Son, the Denis Johnson collection from which “Emergency” had been taken. I read all of the stories in one long sitting, then read them over—in and out of order—discovering something funny or puzzling with each new read.

Since then, Denis Johnson’s books—the stories, the novels, the nonfiction, even the plays—have been a constant presence in my life. If only they’d paid rent inside my book bags and luggage over the years. I’ve dog-eared the pages and underlined the most poignant phrases. I’ve read them out loud to strangers on Greyhound buses. I’ve sent them to relatives stuck inside institutions. And one time—in a fit of desperation within a filthy Central American bathroom—I used a couple of the back matter pages as toilet paper.

So while I was interested in reading and writing before Jesus’ Son, I don’t think I’d be much of a writer had it not been for that slim stack of Xeroxed sheets that was dropped upon my desk a dozen years ago. In Denis Johnson, I found my aspirations as a writer: fiction that was fiercely hilarious, faster than hell, and underpinned by a profound sense of redemption.

It’s a lofty aspiration, and I’m not sure I’ll ever get there, but in the meantime, I take comfort from a few of my favorite lines from Jesus’ Son: “All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”