This book started out as a biography of a novel.

Over time, Toole started to feel like a friend, so much so, that when Kent and I talk, I always refer to Toole as “Kenny”. Giving Toole a voice would become a years-long odyssey that as we immersed deeper into the research often made us feel like Alice going down the rabbit hole – missing police records and coroner’s reports, rumors of a Hollywood curse, the search for a long-lost manuscript, compelling evidence that another author may have plagiarised Toole’s work and gotten away with it, interviews with witnesses who inexplicably changed their stories. Jodee Blanco at the author’s childhood home We’d encountered more than our share of surprises bringing these books to life but nothing could have prepared us for I, John Kennedy Toole. We’d already worked together on many books, two of which became New York Times bestsellers: my memoir, Please Stop Laughing at Me… that was a catalyst for the anti-bullying movement in America and put me at the forefront of intervention nationwide, a role that I’m still engaged in and we co-authored Both of Us, movie star Ryan O’Neal’s memoir about his love affair with Farrah Fawcett. He was the young editor at Grove Press who had acquired A Confederacy of Dunces 40 years earlier and shepherded it to fame. Kent was also a part of the book’s history. The more Kent and I talked about it, the more excited we became. Not much was known about the genesis of Ignatius Reilly, the circumstances that led to his creator’s suicide or Thelma Toole’s campaign to get her son’s book published posthumously. There were a handful of biographies on Toole, who sadly killed himself before the world met Ignatius, but no one had attempted the backstory of A Confederacy of Dunces through a fresh lens. The book became a New York Times bestseller, sold millions of copies, inspired the likes of John Belushi, Will Ferrell and Steven Soderbergh, and earned a place on the top 10 most influential works of American literature. Ignatius Reilly, the slovenly, pontificating misanthrope who embarks on one misadventure after another, was a different kind of hero. When my friend and mentor, Kent Carroll, asked me to co-author a novel with him based on the remarkable events behind the making of John Kennedy Toole’s Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces, I was immediately intrigued.

A confederacy of dunces review