Can the Tom Wolfe Approach Work Today?

The mariachi band played just outside the open window, their melody drifting up and over the bustle of Faneuil Hall. Gerard and I sat in our corner office, suite 720 at 84 State Street, with sandwiches from Al’s unwrapped on the desk between us. The energy of Boston, vibrant, chaotic, alive, surged below. It was our favorite spot for lunch. The window stayed open so we could hear the sounds of the city while we talked about anything and everything. On this particular day, Gerard leaned back in his chair, chewing thoughtfully, and said, “You ever hear of Tom Wolfe?”

I shook my head. “Who’s that?”

Gerard’s eyes lit up. “He wrote The Bonfire of the Vanities. You know what’s wild? He didn’t publish it as a book at first. He wrote it one chapter at a time, publishing each one in Rolling Stone. People loved it so much they demanded the full book. It’s one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.”

I could feel the wheels turning in his head as he stared out the window at the crowds below. Then he looked back at me and said something that changed my life. “You know, maybe you could do something like that. Just write your story, piece by piece, and put it out there. Start with MySpace.”

MySpace. It was 2007, and the platform was just beginning to blow up. At the time, I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to say, let alone whether anyone would care to read it. But Gerard’s idea stuck with me. Could I build an audience? Just me, a keyboard, and the thoughts swirling in my head? Could I write something people would care about?

I didn’t know the answer, but I decided to try. That’s how I started blogging. One post at a time, I put my story into the world, vulnerable, raw, and real. To my surprise, people read it. They shared it. They connected with it. And somewhere along the way, I realized that writing wasn’t just about telling my story. It was about giving others a reason to believe in their own resilience.

That moment over lunch with Gerard was the spark. It was the first time I asked myself if my words could matter. If you’ve read The Dog Story, you already know Gerard. He shows up later, at a different point in the timeline, in a role that has nothing to do with sandwiches or MySpace. This is a piece of the story that came before the story, one of those true things that never made it onto the page because the book had its own spine to follow, and this wasn’t part of it. But it belongs here, on the blog, because without this lunch there probably isn’t a book at all.

So much has changed since the days of MySpace. Social media is now a crowded, noisy landscape of short attention spans and endless scrolling. Everyone has a platform, and it feels harder than ever to stand out. But that’s exactly why I keep coming back to what Gerard said that day. He wasn’t telling me to chase an algorithm. He was telling me that Tom Wolfe put it all on the line, gave his story to the people one piece at a time, and trusted that their belief in his words would carry him somewhere. That idea has stuck with me for almost twenty years.

Here’s where it lands now. I’ve spent close to a year rebuilding The Dog Story from the ground up, the version that started as something I handed out at speaking engagements into something that can stand on a shelf next to the memoirs people actually pick up on their own. It’s done. But instead of sitting on a finished manuscript while I wait for a publisher to say yes, I’m going back to Gerard’s original instinct. I’m self-publishing it, and I’m going to build the audience the way he told me to all those years ago, one piece at a time, right here on this blog, with the same honesty I’ve been writing with since 2007.

I’ve already got a real audience on Facebook, people who’ve been reading me for almost twenty years, and I’ve got speaking engagements booked through September and October where I’ll be talking about Teddy, about MS, about the promise the whole book is built around. This blog is going to carry chapters, behind-the-scenes pieces like this one, and the audio version through Eleven Labs, so people can listen the way they’d listen to me tell it from a stage. If Tom Wolfe could build Bonfire of the Vanities one Rolling Stone installment at a time and end up with one of the great novels of the century, I like my odds of building something real the same way. And if it works the way Gerard thinks it might, maybe a bigger publisher takes notice down the line. Maybe not. Either way, the story gets told, and it gets told the way I’ve always told it, one honest piece at a time.

I’m not asking you to take a chance on an idea anymore. I’m telling you it’s already happening. What about you? Would you follow a story told one chapter at a time? I’m about to find out.