Buzz Bissinger On Friday Night Lights, His New Book Father's Day, And Twitter

Friday Night Lights, his recently released follow-up documenting his twenty-five year relationship with Boobie Miles, After Friday Night Lights; Bissinger's latest book, Father's Day, a memoir about raising one of his twin sons who was born with brain damage; what he thinks about Twitter; and his current opinion on blogs. You can find out more about Father's Day here, follow Buzz's 140-character screeds @buzzbissinger, and read part one of our interview about banning college football.

You recently released the follow up to the original Friday Night Lights called After Friday Night Lights. Can you tell us a little bit about it for our readers? I sort of call it a postscript because it was definitely short. Byliner—which is a website that specializes in these types of e-books and e-booklets—approached me when they started and said, "Do you have any ideas?" We kicked around some things and I really didn't. But then I called them and told them I didn't want to write a sequel to Friday Night Lights. People have said I should and I really didn't want to, but I have this really special relationship with one of these players, really the cornerstone character of the book. We've known each other for 20 years and we now love each other but there's been love, anger, pain and fear on both ends. My fear of what will become of Boobie [Miles] and Boobie's fear of what will become himself. They said that sounded like a really good story because it was personal and a different take.

I've kept in touch with Boobie since Friday Night Lights when I saw what he went through in high school. If you have any sense of morality and decency you don't forget that, you just don't. You don't forget the fear and panic in his face when he got injured and you certainly don't forget the way an entire town turned against him and hurled racial epithets against him. I couldn't forget it. And then when his uncle died in 1998 he began to call me and I knew he needed help. I stepped in—maybe it started out of guilt, there's no question that he was the cornerstone of the book—but I really stepped in because I want him to succeed in life if he can.

Some of the financial help I've given him has helped a little bit and some of it has been wasted. It's more than financial help, because I am a father, I try to guide him along in terms of not getting angry and not getting impulsive and not lashing out in a way that may get him fired or get him into trouble. The problem is that I live far away from him but we talk all the time either by phone or texting or seeing each other. That's really how it evolved. I do love him and I worry about him and I really do care about him. He's a good man, he's much smarter than he was given credit for.

The bottom of it is that I saw with my own eyes what happens when you're treated as a football animal, which is how he and a lot of these college kids are treated. It was felt about Boobie that without football he was—and this was said by a coach, not by me—"a big dumb old nigger." The thought was he could not be educated. Now I don't believe that, I don't believe he was meant to be a physicist, but he had nothing to fall back on. It's really, really hurt him. The way America is today he has this very weird and very false sense of celebrity. A lot of people may not know his name but they know his story. But he got nothing out of it, nothing. The movie couldn't have been made without him and the movie people gave him $1,000.

When you were writing the book did you expect to become such long-term friends with any of the subjects? No. I mean I've always kept up a relationship with certain people that I've written about and I've kept up closely with another of the players that I wrote about. So no, it wasn't necessarily expected but I always kept my eye on Boobie because I really was afraid that his life was going to be tough. I was afraid that he just couldn't get the stars out of his eyes, this sense of being cheated, this sense of, as he says, "Could have or should have is a big fucking headache." And it is, because I think he thought about it all the time, that he should have been a pro football player. I knew when you have that type of dream, particularly when it's destroyed by an injury, I always felt there could be trouble down the line. For no selfish reason I felt obligated to help, to do what I can, more than just giving him money.

After the movie there were a fair amount of speaking engagements; whenever I could I said you should really pay for Boobie to come. He's great with high school kids, he's fantastic. His speech is short and it's really, really powerful and he's really, really honest. He says, "I'm the casebook example of what happens when you don't have an education." They gravitate towards him. So we went outside of St. Louis and Los Angeles and Montclair, NJ so he could get a share of the proceeds. I'm paying proceeds of the book with him, paying him a third. Who knows how it'll do. If it does well he'll get some decent money. He has a woman that he's lived with who has a checking account and is grounded. If he spent it all in one swoop, it ain't gonna work. He's an adult and I'm not going to dictate how he spends it.

When you wrote the Friday Night Lights, did you expect the negative reaction from the people of Odessa? I knew they weren't going to like but I thought it was going to be much more of a Hoosiers-type book. But as I've tried to point out to them, and they don't listen, I didn't have any idea what was going to happen. I had no idea about the racism that would be directed towards Boobie and for that matter I had no idea the animosity that would be directed towards the coach when it looked like they might not make the playoffs. He lost two games by a single point each. I had no idea how terrible the academic standards would be at the school. I had no idea just how intense the pressure would be on the kids, I had no idea they would fly to away games on private jets. I'm a journalist, I have to be fair, but I have to put in what's right and what I see. I knew people would be upset but I didn't think there would be threats of bodily harm at bookstores. When those threats were made, I know people in Odessa and I knew they were serious, that's why I canceled [the events].

Now all is forgiven. I've actually been down to Odessa at least half a dozen times. The first time I sort of announced myself publicly was in 2004 but then I was there in 2007 and actually went back with my son in 2009, they even invited me to the 20th reunion of the class that I wrote about. It was nice, it was nice seeing the kids. Some are lost but some did really well, so that was nice to see as well. It was fun being there.

Did you ever think that the Friday Night Lights franchise would go this far? No, I mean, I'd been a journalist long enough—at that point about 15 years—I knew enough to know I had a great story. So I had expectations that it would sell well but I had no idea that it would still be selling today at the rate of 35,000 to 40,000 copies a year. It's sold somewhere in the vicinity of 2 million copies and then spawned a movie and then from that a television show.

And now a second movie! Well, I don't think that's going to happen. Put it this way: I wouldn't bet your house on it. I'm hoping for the musical, though, and the passion play. If they made a musical out of Vince Lombardi they can make a musical out of Friday Night Lights.

Does the current product resemble your initial vision for the book? Well the movie was really based on the book. It obviously took liberties, as movies do and should do, but it was much more based on the book. The TV show was inspired by the book and you can see that they used a lot of thematic material but it was different. It was set in the modern day, with a fictional town and fictional characters. I met with the writers at the beginning but it was abundantly clear to me that they knew exactly what they were doing and they had a really good vision for it and they didn't need me hanging around. I was not a regular watcher of the show because I felt kind of Friday Night Light-ed out. I'd been there, I'd seen it. What I saw I thought was great but it just wasn't something I really wanted to watch anymore.

Do you see yourself adapting any more of your work for the Short Books or Long Reads format? Yeah. I don't know if I would adapt any of my other books but the idea of doing e-books, something from scratch, not having to spend two or three years that you have to spend on a book has appeal to me. Books take a long time to do and publishing is more of a precarious endeavor than ever. At least with these e-books you can get them out quickly and you know right away how they're going to do. I think in a sense that probably is the future, to some degree, what's going to happen with publishing.

You can go from e-book to a full on book. That's a good idea. That's a very good point. You write an e-book and it's 75 pages and you feel there's enough there to do a full scale book. It's something that does appeal to me. Writing books is hard! Look, it's great when it's great and it's shitty when it's shitty and it's always a lot of both. In the beginning, it's always shitty.

Do you have any other areas of sports or education that you'd like to investigate like you did for Friday Night Lights? No, I don't really think that way in terms of my ideas. I'm not a sports writer—though a lot of people call me that—I just gravitate towards ideas that grab me and I think can sustain me in writing a book. So my newest book Father's Day is just totally different from anything I've ever done because it's such a personal story. There's always a danger in writing a personal story that no one gives a shit about it. It's something that compelled me, something that I wanted to write.

At it's base it's a book about fatherhood and how fathers have a special relationship with sons and we do live through our children, live through our sons. We have dreams and expectations. In this instance, I knew from the minute Zach was born that that wasn't going to be the case. I wanted to take this trip across the country with him because I wanted to spend time alone with him and really interact with him. It was so easy...he obsesses on things, and fixates on things, so it's easy to let him go into his own world.

The trip was marvelous, at the end, the beginning was very rocky. It's a book of wrenching honesty and honesty about what it's like to have a child like Zach. It isn't about love, because I love him to death, but you feel frustration, you feel robbed, you feel cheated, you feel pain. You go through a whole gamut of emotions before you find acceptance and realize that you have to act in his best interest as opposed to yours. The point is, I do all sorts of different things. Friday Night Lights is so hard to top that if I did another sports investigation it wouldn't have nearly the success. When writers try to repeat something they've done it's usually a disaster.

Father's Day is out on May 15th, can you tell us a little more about it? The framework is a cross country trip that I took with my son Zach. Zach is a twin and he was born three and a half months prematurely in 1983 at one pound, 11 ounces. He had oxygen deprivation at birth and was very, very sick and as a result had trace brain damage. He's very, very verbal, he actually has marvelous verbal skills. He works at a grocery store bagging groceries and he actually works at the Philadelphia News stocking supplies so he's certainly functional. But he's never going to marry and I don't know if he's ever going to kiss. He's never going to live alone or drive a car. His biggest problem is still comprehension, which is very limited.

I felt like I never really knew him and I also felt periods of frustration and rage—not towards him but, "How did this happen? Why me?"—feeling sorry for myself. I never expected to have a child like this. He was a twin and he had a twin brother who had no residual affects whatsoever. It's constantly like looking into mirrors and one has cracks and one does not. Jerry has thrived and done wonderful as an adult and gone to college and got his masters in education. He's a full time teacher and owns a house and I'm sure will get married. All the things that you want for your child. Zach obviously has a very different trajectory and I felt like I'd never had a real conversation with him. On the trip I was determined to really interact and also tell him what he was like, what had happened to him. I felt he deserved to know that, I don't believe that ignorance is bliss. I think self-awareness can help; it's helped him, it's helped me. I discovered a tremendous amount about him that I really did not know before. His ability for empathy, his sixth sense intuition, his wonderful humor—because he just says whatever is on his mind, he's very observant. Also his ability to kind of put his arm around himself, to assert his independence in a way he can.

The trip was very cathartic but this book is really wrenchingly honest. I held nothing back in terms of what I felt at times having a child like that. The frustration and difficulty as well as the love. Also in terms of myself, so it's both my journey with Zach but it's also, in a sense, my own personal journey to sort out things that had affected me and made me the way I am.

Would you say this is by far your most emotional—from a personal standpoint—book? It's by far my most emotional book. Writing about yourself personally is hard and it's hard when you've made a decision that you're just going to go for it and reveal yourself. You worry that people will think that you're just too volatile. There are moments where I get volatile, I get angry easily. Interestingly, it was Zach, the so called "disabled" one, who really calmed me down and guided me through. But [the book] took four years and it should not have. It just took forever to write because I was scared of it and couldn't get the right tone and the right narrative. I started right after the trip and wrote for six months and it just sucked. I couldn't look at it so I put it away. Another project came along and then I returned to it two years later. Finally opened it up and I was terrified, I knew it would suck and it really did suck. I just dove in and rewrote it. I saw some openings and found the right tone and, as usually happens, my editor called and said, "If we don't get this in six months we're not going to publish it." That's always the best incentive of all. You write a book like this and you worry. Everyone wants their book to sell and I think it does have applications for every parent. It's about being a parent and it certainly has applications of the millions of parents who have children who are different. Recent studies show that one in 88 kids are autistic. Zach is not autistic but he has some autistic-like symptoms.

Who knows. It's my story and people might say, "i don't really care about your story." I worry that people will say that I'm just revealing too much, that it's difficult to read. My feeling is that if you're going to do a book like this what's the point if you're not going to be honest? If you're going to sugar coat it I just don't believe in that. I believe too many memoirs are sugar coated and are ginned up and are written in a way to make the subject look good and everyone else around them not. It's far more complex than that. It never had to do with not loving my son, I love him to death. It was really trying to get to know him.

Do you have any plans for another road trip together? Well I would do it in a second. The problem is that Zach revealed to me during the trip, or even before, he really wanted to fly. He doesn't like the car. I invoked father prerogative and said, "Well Zach, we're driving because that's the whole point of a cross country trip." So I don't know how we would do it flying.

We did have a great breakthrough; I went to South Africa—my son Caleb is on an exchange program from Kenyon. He's going to the Cape Town University for a semester. So I took my son Jerry and I took Zach, first time he's ever been overseas. It's a long, long flight for him and I was worried about how he would handle it and we worked out some strategies for it. He really, really wanted to go, which I thought was great. It was another assertion of his independence and I wanted him to go because I don't like taking these trips where he's not a part of it and he did beautifully. Now he really wants to go to London, now he's become an international traveler.

Fill up that passport! Exactly.

So you are now on Twitter.I am on Twitter. I never realized that Twitter would become such a big part of my writing persona [laughs]. For me it's just 140 characters where you kind of riff and vent and steam but I guess it's a part of who I am. Although it's still only 140 fucking characters written off the top of your head. I don't really quite consider it writing but I guess people do.

Are you enjoying that interaction with your fans? Yeah, I am. I don't do it nearly as much as I did. In the beginning I was doing it so I could avoid writing the book. Every now and then something will bit my butt. I'll get up in the morning and something will piss me off and Twitter is a good place to vent. I have a lot of fun with the people who react and respond; they give me grief or I give them grief. I can be over the top at times. I do say things I feel but like everyone who Tweets there is this sense afterward of, "Why the fuck did I just say that?" In one case it really cost me a very dear friendship and that was really sad. That was a case where I should have kept my Twitter mouth shut but I didn't.

Well I think a lot of things are like that, right? Once you put it out there you can't really take it back. I'm really outspoken, I've always been that way. Sometimes I've put it out there that's too sharp and too shrill and, frankly, too nasty. It's one thing to be incisive and it's another to take gratuitous shots at anyone.

That makes me think of your well-documented incident with Will Leitch back in 2008. I don't know. I keep thinking I was on drugs at that time but I wasn't. Or maybe I should have been on drugs. I went berserk. I really did not understand the blogosphere and how big it was. Trust me, after that I did understand. The grief I got was enormous and a lot of it was deserved. It was a much bigger world than I had ever imagined. The irony is now I write for the Daily Beast, which is a website; I Tweet. Will Leitch writes for print. So I'm the Renaissance man and he's the troglodyte!

Have your opinions on blogs and bloggers evolved over these past five years? Yeah because you know what, I could stick my head in the stand and say, "Fuck the blogs! I'm a print man and I'm going to stick to print" but that's ridiculous. Times change and I'm 57 and certainly there are things about me that aren't going to change. There are blogs out there that are good, there's some writing that is very good and you've got to change with the times, or at least try to. Otherwise you're going to get left behind, you're just being stubborn for the sake of being stubborn. I've had a lot of fun on Twitter and it's gained me a lot of followers who really respect my work and look forward to it, that's really gratifying. There are some who think I'm an asshole. The thing that worries me is I get many more followers when I don't Tweet and then when I do Tweet it drops precipitously! I'm much better off when I don't Tweet!

Well people want to hear what you have to say, I guess. Some get offended and some don't and that's the price that you pay. If I go over the top I will apologize for it. People make mistakes. I always believe what I say and most of the time I just stick with it. I don't mind sparring with people and teasing but I hate being misrepresented and I don't care who the fuck it is. If they misrepresent me I'm going to fight back. Some people say, "Well what are you doing that for? You're an established author and writer." I don't care! Why should somebody be able to take a gratuitous shot at me?

Everyone has the right to defend themselves and express their opinions. Yeah I think they do. My wife hates the fact that I Tweet, she hates it. She hates the fact that I tweet about her as Wife #3 and she's demanded retraction but I've refused to give it. When she knows that I'm Tweeting she'll shut my office door and won't talk to me for a few hours.

My wife hates the fact that I Tweet and check Twitter so often too. Twitter serves a wonderful function of being on top of news, too. I like it much better than Facebook, it's a lot more fun.

You kind of get to choose, in a way, what you want to follow. It has more bite to it, I think. It's more spunky. So much of Facebook is what I fucking ate for lunch today. I don't really care what you ate for fucking lunch today.