Will Blythe
Will Blythe was once best known as the literary editor of Esquire. Now his name is as often connected with a significant obsession: the Duke-UNC Basketball rivalry. His memoir, To Hate Like This is to Be Happy Forever, is a Tar Heel classic and a New York Times bestseller, having been reviewed to wide critical acclaim. The Chapel Hill native now lives in New York City, where one day on the street he met a man who'd been homeless for more than a decade. This man, known as Cadillac Man, had kept his spirited, empathetic nature alive by writing down his adventures and observations as stories. His chance meeting with Will led to a fast friendship and the recent publication of Cadillac's memoir: Land of the Lost Souls: My Life on the Streets.
Blythe describes his own book as "partly memoir, partly history, partly the chronicle of a season, partly a fan's notes, partly profile, partly crackpot theorizing and partly other people's poetry...; The danger of course, is that a book that tries to be about everything ends up being a book about nothing. But I really couldn't have written this any other way. My mind seems to function in a highly allusive manner. For me, one thing leads to another which eventually loops back around to the original notion... If I'm not mistaken, that's the nature of obsession, that constant circling and ruminating." This description aptly explains the subtitle of To Hate Like This is to Be Happy Forever: A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry.
Blythe has written for numerous publications, including Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, Elle, The New Yorker and the Oxford American. He edited the collection, Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction. His work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Sportswriting, The Oxford American Book of Great Music Writing, State-by-State: A Panoramic Portrait of America and Long Story Short: Flash Fiction by Sixty-five of North Carolina's Finest Writers. He is a regular reviewer of fiction for The New York Times.
