Drew Buxton’s Daytona Teddy Riggs follows Teddy “Daytona” Riggs, a former high school football star in 1996 Corpus Christi who is determined to win the World’s Strongest Man competition. Cast out from his oil-rich family and devoted to the teachings of a self-help guru, Teddy’s obsessive pursuit of strength begins to unravel when a relationship with a local bodybuilder forces him to confront the insecurities beneath the muscle. Buxton’s debut novel blends outrageous comedy and satire with an exploration of masculinity, privilege, mental illness and obsession.
Buxton is the author of the story collection So Much Heart, winner of the Texas Institute of Letters’ Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction. His work has appeared in Southwest Review, Joyland, Vice, and elsewhere.
For My Reading Life, Buxton spoke with Debutiful about the books and writers that have shaped him as a reader and writer.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
Like a lot of kids in the 90s, I was obsessed with Goosebumps. I remember being in third grade, and everyone was reading them. With the first one, Welcome to Dead House, I struggled with a lot of the vocabulary initially. I chose it for reading time, and I remember having to convince my teacher I could do it. I was so motivated to push through. I ended up reading the first 45 in the series or something before I recognized they all followed the same formula. I tried to get into Fear Street, R.L. Stine’s young adult series, but it didn’t do it for me for some reason.
What book helped you through puberty?
I liked the movie Simon Birch when I was eleven, and saw that it was based on A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. I started reading it and felt totally immersed in this foreign world of New England. It was by far the longest novel I’d read to that point, and I was a really slow reader as a kid. It felt like it took me a year to read. It was so comforting to return to it and escape to that world every day. I felt sad when I finally finished it.
I recently tried to read another John Irving novel, and I only made it twenty pages, maybe. I found it really heavy-handed. I realized I wouldn’t like Owen Meany if I picked it up today. As a kid, all I cared about with reading, at least on a conscious level, was story. I never thought about prose or craft or theme, but as a writer now, I can’t help it. If I love a book, I want to figure out how a writer is doing what they’re doing. Sometimes I wish I could get back to being able to get totally lost in a book.
What book do you wish 16-year-old you had read?
A lot of great stuff would’ve gone over my head at 16. I read some great authors like Faulkner too early, and didn’t fully appreciate it until I revisited it later. You can always go back to that stuff, but the work aimed like at younger audiences, if you don’t read it by a certain age, you can’t experience it the way it was intended. I never read The Perks of Being a Wallflower, but I bet I would’ve loved it in middle school.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the
Syllabus?
I recently left academia partly because I hate teaching, haha. I’d assign a story that I loved, something that was hugely inspiring to me when I was their age, and they’d be totally unimpressed, or someone would find something about it offensive, and that would take over class. I would just throw my hands up and be tempted to end class half-an-hour early. Eventually, I started teaching mediocre stuff that would at least allow for some level of productive discussion.
But if I just cared about teaching the best writing possible, I’d assign Big World by Mary Miller, Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, Drown by Junot Díaz, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer, Fat City by Leonard Gardner, Thunderstruck by Elizabeth McCracken, Airships by Barry Hannah, and Rent Boy by Gary Indiana.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
I was pretty locked in on cranking out the book, so I didn’t read much during that time. One book I thought about a lot though was Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash. It’s similar to my novel in that it has a first-person narrator who’s obsessed with a specific athletic goal. The voice is much different, much quieter, in a way that takes a lot of confidence, I think. His commitment to the voice and character were inspiring.
What books are on your nightstand now?
I’m reading Darryl by Jackie Ess right now and really loving it. The voice is so good. I love when narration swerves all over the place but maintains control just enough to stay on the road. Another recent one that sticks out is a short collection by Shane Kowalski called Are People Out There?
I’m back in school now, trying to become a radiation therapist. I have a long commute to San Marcos, so I’ve been listening to a lot of nonfiction audiobooks. I can’t do fiction audiobooks because they require too much focus, and I like to mark up novels with a pen. I’ve come to really appreciate the art of longform journalism and the monumental effort that goes into it. And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts blew me away. It covers the AIDS epidemic from every possible angle, and reads like a thriller somehow. It was published in 1987, so there’s an intense immediacy to it. Apparently, Shilts didn’t check his HIV status until he finished the book because he didn’t want the results to cloud his judgment. He ended up passing away in 1994. The book is an incredible feat.