Putting the Pieces Back Together: A Conversation with Timothy J. Hillegonds
Over the last few years, I’ve encountered Timothy J. Hillegonds’s writing in such publications as Brevity, RHINO, and Baltimore Review, and I’ve always been impressed by his ability to tell personal stories with rich detail and a deep emotional impact. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to interview him about his memoir, The Distance Between, which deals with his struggle with absent fatherhood and toxic masculinity, both in his father and in himself. Tim and I discussed why it’s vital for men to join the conversation about toxic masculinity and teach other men what is acceptable behavior and what is not.
Brian Wallace Baker: To start with, can you tell the reader a bit about The Distance Between?
Timothy J. Hillegonds: Thematically, the book deals with young fatherhood, toxic masculinity, identity, adolescent rage, addiction, and absent fathers. The story itself is essentially what happened in my life between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one.
After trying and failing to have a meaningful relationship with my biological father, and then vowing to never be like him, I became increasingly rebellious and got myself arrested a few times and then expelled from high school. When I turned eighteen, I cobbled together a hundred bucks, a snowboard, and a bag of clothes, and took a one-way flight to Colorado with hopes of snowboarding myself into a new and better life. I had dreams of going pro, but when I got out there, perhaps predictably, things went sideways, and I ended up in a relationship with a young woman named April that became tumultuous and increasingly toxic almost immediately.
Drugs, desperation, abuse, rage—these were all present in our relationship from the start. I was incredibly angry for reasons I didn’t really understand at the time, and it seemed as if we were always fighting and I was always getting arrested. April, who already had a child, became pregnant a few months after we met, and not even a year into our relationship, when I was still nineteen, April and I had a daughter. We tried to make it work in the beginning, April and me, and I did my best to be a father, but I was a confused, angry, selfish, immature addict with no self-control, and our relationship failed in epic ways.
Three years and many arrests later, the State of Colorado asked me to leave, which meant I had to leave my daughter, which meant I would become exactly like the man I had vowed never to be like: my own father.
BWB: Your book and its theme of toxic masculinity feel especially timely to what’s happening in society right now, with so many women coming forward about being treated inappropriately by men. It can seem like mostly women talking about this issue. What do you think it brings to the conversation to have a male voice discussing toxic masculinity?
TJH: There are actually quite a few men talking and writing about toxic masculinity right now—Jared Yates Sexton, P. Carl, and Thomas Page McBee, for starters. There’s also a social movement known as the “healthy masculinities movement” that’s working to help men—through classes and programs and conversations—reshape and redefine what modern masculinity can look like.
While so much of what I’ve learned about masculinity—and the ways in which my particular brand of masculinity has been harmful—has come from women I’ve talked to and read, men are the people who ultimately need to do the hard work that true change requires. No one can fix our problems for us. In the same way I’ve learned that it’s the responsibility of white people to educate other white people about racism and privilege, men need to educate other men about ways in which masculinity has harmed generations of women—and themselves.
BWB: How does your finished manuscript differ from the book you thought you were going to write?
TJH: I don’t know if I really knew what it was going to be in the beginning. So much of writing is just starting down a path and seeing where it leads you. You run into dead ends and barriers along the way, and then you start to revise and themes begin floating to the surface. Then you begin to sharpen your focus. I think my original manuscript was around 120,000 words, and I revised that down to 92,000. There were a lot of darlings to kill. I had to get rid of entire sections. In that sense it’s very different from what I thought it was going to be. But I learned early on to hold my ideas loosely and take the advice of writers I trusted. Michele Morano, my dear friend and writing mentor, helped me a lot with this book. She’s extremely intuitive and forthcoming, and not afraid to say what needs to be said, to challenge ideas and conclusions I would never think to challenge. Letting other trusted voices into your work is imperative.
BWB: Your writing is vivid and in-the-moment. How were you able to reach into your memory and flesh out your experiences into a book-length narrative?
TJH: Lots of ways. First, I went into rehab when I was twenty-six—five years after Colorado—and in rehab (and in the months after) I did a lot of writing. The memories were a lot fresher then than they are now. So when it came to writing the book, I had that record to go back to, which proved critical.
Also, being in the age of technology that we are, Google Maps was a tool I used quite a bit. While writing, I would think about the buildings I had lived in and where scenes took place, and then I would look at them via satellite image to see if things looked the way I remembered them.
In terms of figuring out the specifics of my arrest record, I went through the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. I wanted to make sure all the incidents I was writing about were accurate, so I chose only those incidents that showed up on the Colorado Bureau of Investigation report. I felt like I had to do that for a couple of reasons: one, because, as a writer, I owe it to the reader to be thorough; two, because everything is so easily accessible on the Internet nowadays. If we learned anything from the James Frey situation, it’s that memoirists need to be as accurate as possible. Everyone is an Internet sleuth these days, and I think there are quite a few people with time on their hands who have no problem fact-checking your work.
BWB: Do you think research makes you more creative, or do you think it gives you some constraints when you’re writing memoir?
TJH: In some ways it’s freeing. It’s like someone giving you the structure, saying, “Build this house; here’s the framing.” And you say, “Okay, I can take it from here.” So much of memoir for me is just trying to put the pieces back together. And I want it to be as true as possible. Establishing the contract with the reader is important. The reader is going to assume this story happened. My job as the writer is to fulfill the contract by giving the reader as close an approximation to the truth as I can, and that comes from doing as much research as possible to verify whatever I can verify.
BWB: The images in your writing always seem to be more than just images. There’s characterization and emotion and meaning behind them. Does metaphor play an important role in your work?
TJH: I wish I could say I was smart enough to always have an amazing metaphor in mind. I think if metaphor does show up, it happens in the revision process. Intuitively, there’s something in my head when I’m writing, but I don’t usually identify it as a metaphor that’s going to hold a piece together until later, and it’s usually when someone else points it out. I often take quite a while to put the first draft of an essay together, so it’s fairly well developed, and then I’ll workshop it with my writing group in Chicago, and they’re all pretty astute observers. They sometimes pick up on stuff and say, “Look, this metaphor is punching us in the face.” And then once it’s identified, I’ll look for ways to enhance it during revision. Someone in my writing group once talked about metaphor being horses running side-by-side through a field of tall grass. So in every essay you identify your horses, your metaphors, and you try to ensure that they’re all running through the tall grass of the piece together.
BWB: Do you have another book in the works?
TJH: Definitely. I’ve been working on an essay collection for the last couple of years that’s titled Recoveries. It’s a collection that’s looking at the ways in which we recover, and arguing that there’s no such thing as recovery, singular, and only recoveries, plural. I believe that the larger concept of recovery is actually made up of dozens of smaller recoveries, whether we’re talking about recovery of self or relationships, or from trauma or substances. The essays in the collection also deal with what happened to me in the years after Colorado, which many readers of The Distance Between have asked me about. I’m also using form and structure to find new ways into the material.
Timothy J. Hillegonds (@TimHillegonds) is the author of the memoir The Distance Between (Nebraska, 2019). A 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee, Tim's work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Salon, The Daily Beast, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Brevity, Fourth Genre, Hippocampus Magazine, and elsewhere. In 2019, Tim was named by the Guild Literary Complex as one of their thirty "Writers to Watch.” He currently serves as a contributing editor for Slag Glass City, a digital journal of the urban essay arts.
Brian Wallace Baker (@bbrianwallace) is a Utah-born writer whose work has been published by Atticus Review, Colorado Review, River Teeth, and others. He is an MFA candidate at Western Kentucky University.