Free The Search for Philip K. Dick by Anne R. Dick

a child. When I became pregnant after trying for one whole month Phil was excited and worried. He continually urged me to eat brewer’s yeast, wheat germ, soy protein, and other Adelle Davis food recommendations. We had just read her first book. He stuffed me like a Strasbourg goose, so that at the end of my pregnancy I had gained fifty pounds and weighed as much as he did. He himself went on a vitamin regime, tossing large quantities of every kind of vitamin down his throat. His tongue turned black. A physician friend told him that this condition had been caused by an overdose of vitamin A. After that, Phil never took another vitamin in his life, and began saying that all health food “nuts” were “fascists.”
    Phil took me to the doctor at monthly intervals. One day, in the waiting room, he said to me, quite seriously, “I wish I’d become a gynecologist; if I’d only realized …”
    Phil finished
Confessions of a Crap Artist
at the end of that happy first summer and brought it to me to read. When I finished it I sat for a while with the book on my lap, feeling puzzled and uneasy. “What a strange, uncomfortable novel,” I thought, “so close to reality in some ways, so far in others. Was I really like Fay? I hoped not, because I didn’t like her at all. No I wasn’t like Fay. I guess this is what fiction writers do.” I swept any problems the novel hinted at out of my mind. I had tremendous faith in Phil as a writer and tremendous faith in our relationship. Call it denial if you will, but perhaps faith is the other side of the denial coin and faith can move mountains.
    The setting of the novel, the house, the sheep, the children, the details of our lives (like my sweeping up the scattered children’s toys with a broom) are accurate. In the novel, Fay sweeps Nat off his feet, not vice versa, as in real life. I wondered why Phil wrote it that way. Like Fay, I was put out that Phil cooked big breakfasts that made me gain weight. My late husband’s ashes really were sent to the Palace Market. I was outspoken and direct, but not that crude, and not devious. I’m afraid that Phil was the devious one. If Fay was a portrait of me, it was not one of warts and all, but all warts. Phil portrayed Fay as needing a husband for herself and a father for her children, so she acquired Nat. He had internalized Dr. A’s idea. It never seemed to occur to Nat that Fay loved him.
    In spite of my confused and uneasy feelings, I could see that it was a good novel, well written, unusual, and full of color. I told Phil this and then asked him, “Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t want to when I asked you to go to the store to buy some Tampax?”
    Charley Hume wasn’t at all like Richard. Richard was quiet and withdrawn, an anxious, sensitive person although he had an athletic, healthy look. Phil had more sympathy for Charley than for Fay, a typical fifties male attitude. In his novel, it was Fay’s fault that Charley hit her. I guess she was supposed to have some mystical control over his motor nervous system.
    I was amazed many years later when I read the introduction to the Entwhistle Press edition of
Confessions.
Phil goes on at length about what a wonderful fellow Jack Isidore is, obviously identifying with that weird, provincial, sexless fellow whose head was filled with fantasy. The Phil I knew was as much like Jack Isidore as a bird of paradise is like a bat. The French movie
, Barjo,
portrayed the dark side of that novel, and it did a great job portraying Jack. It was fun to see a beautiful French movie star playing a role that had been based on me even though the woman portrayed in the movie was a cold, demanding, manipulative bitch—and not like me at all
.
    Confessions of a Crap Artist
didn’t sell. It wasn’t published until 1975 and then by a small private house. The editor’s introduction states, “Shortly after completing it, he married the woman who had inspired him to create Fay Hume, and they lived