The Man Who Fell in Love With The Moon - Writing The Novel

Writing The Novel

Author Tom Spanbauer was born in Idaho and raised on a farm there, and Spanbauer drew heavily on his upbringing for settings in the book.

After graduating from Idaho State University in 1969 with a bachelor's degree and then spending two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya, Spanbauer married and returned to Idaho where he obtained a job at his alma mater as a counselor and advisor to the student Indian Club. He met and became involved with Clyde Hall, a two-spirit (and later a tribal elder) Shoshone-Métis. Three months later, the two became blood brothers. Hall had a deep influence on Spanbauer that directly led to the writing of The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon:

...Clyde Hall put my feet on the ground, and when I looked at the ground I saw that it was my mother. Clyde helped me to see the world was alive and full of mystery. He pretty much took me out of my Christian European culture head and helped me see that I wasn’t separated from nature. That by stepping into my body, I stepped into nature. ... he thing I want to impress on you the most, is my life and his came together in such a way that kind of blew us both out of the water. Speaking for myself, I could never have written The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon without Clyde, or any of the rest of my books.

Spanbauer moved to New York City permanently in 1983 and entered the Columbia University Writing Program. Spanbauer took a job as an apartment building supervisor in the East Village, and began abusing alcohol and taking cocaine. He began writing The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon in 1987, and by 1988 was deep into the manuscript. The writing process was a very difficult one for Spanbauer. He had so little money that he lived like "a subway rat, pale and frail, trying hard to believe in" the novel he was writing. He later said, "A lot of the stuff I came up with was pretty fearsome, facing some personal devils head-on. I couldn't distinguish between the world and the book. At one point, I was so stressed out, I passed out in Penn Station." As he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer after the book's publication, "It's all a matter of trust. You're right in the middle of this story. You don't know the end of it. It's this preposterous tale about these preposterous people, and you don't know what's going to happen next, and you're tired of eating chicken livers and fettuccine, and you're alone in this little square concrete apartment, there's no air or earth, and pretty soon it was hard for me to distinguish what was going on in my head and what was going on on the outside." The book took four and a half years and seven revisions to complete.

In one memorable sequence in the book, the cowboy drifter (and both men believe, Shed's father), Dellwood Barker, has homosexual anal intercourse with Shed and teaches Shed about the "Wild Moon Man"—an anthropomorphic representation of neotantric sex and expanded orgasm. According to Spanbauer, the idea for the Wild Moon Man came out of his own imagination:

The Hairy Moon Man came out of my very own dirty little mind. I think it may be based on the archetype of the puer, or Eternal Boy. I hooked up the puer with Narcissus and I got a pool of water. And inside the pool of water is the exact opposite of the fine sensitive boy. The dark side of the fine puer who wants to be pulled down to the darkest place and have his asshole ravished by the hairy beast. Those of us who have made this journey under water, or to the other side—to the under world and back—have an awareness, and a responsibility to the rest of the world to tell the story.

Completing the manuscript did not occur until early 1991 and left Spanbauer emotionally and physically exhausted, so he moved to Oregon to recuperate.