Gary Cartwright (1934–2017)

Texas: Memoir
Gary Cartwright
The Best I Recall: A Memoir
Austin: University of Texas Press
978-0-292-74907-8, hardcover, $27.95
272 pages; with photos
June 1, 2015

The Best I Recall, the latest release in the Charles N. Prothro Texana Series from the University of Texas Press, is the much-anticipated memoir by Texan, journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and chameleon Gary Cartwright. During his fifty-year-career, beginning with the police beat for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1956, Cartwright has written about everything from crime and politics to sports and travel (to name a very few), for the Dallas Morning News, Sports Illustrated, Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, and National Geographic Traveler, among many, many other publications. He is the winner of a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship and numerous awards, including an Edgar and the Lon Tinkle Award for lifetime achievement from the Texas Institute of Letters.


The Best I Recall is an earnest and painfully honest (“…that’s who I was – who I am – careless, self-centered, impulsive, and egotistical beyond all telling.”) but rather ordinary account of an extraordinary life. It’s the story of the evolution of an innocent. “We were a generation in which sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll had replaced sock hops, Juicy Fruit, and Patti Page.” The often sobriety-challenged Cartwright’s list of friends and acquaintances includes famous and/or infamous names every Texan recognizes: Blackie Sherrod, Dan Jenkins, Jack Ruby, Lamar and Bunker Hunt, Billy Lee Brammer, Don Meredith, Larry L. King, Warren Burnett, Ann Richards, Willie Nelson and, of course, his soul mate, Bud Shrake. Cartwright knows which closets the skeletons can be found in.

The book flows intuitively with each part signifying the beginning of a new era in his career. Cartwright spends adequate space on his favorite stories over the years. Two of his investigations helped free inmates from prison and he says that “…nothing in my career as a writer-journalist has given me greater satisfaction.” Cartwright glories in exposing with sardonic wit the absurdities so abundant in hoary Texas tropes. For instance, he writes of Dallas in 1963: “Right-wing nutcases had captured Dallas, which was ripe for the taking. Today, Dallas is one of my favorite cities, but back then it had the heart of a weasel.”

Cartwright is most eloquent when writing about health and mortality (“When you’ve lived life to the max, dying seems especially slow and clumsy and mean”), his craft (“And yet, and yet … against all logic we go on tinkering with words, moving them about, listening to their cadence, standing them on their heads, turning them inside out, waiting, hoping, praying”) and Willie Nelson (“The rules were mapped on his face and crusted in his voice, which has always seemed less melodic by daylight”).
Four marriages and three children later, Cartwright has mellowed some (“What seemed like a grand journey into the all-knowing was actually double time to nowhere”). The older and maybe wiser Cartwright writes of his health woes that they have “encouraged in me two virtues that had never troubled me before — patience and humility.” Others have made this comparison but it is apt — Cartwright is Texas’s answer to Hunter S. Thompson. What a long, strange trip it’s been.

Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life.… (more)