Brooklyn Book Launch: Tibetan Peach Pie by Tom Robbins

Tom Robbins is a matchless writer whose quirky, beloved work is firmly embedded in American popular culture. From Another Roadside Attraction and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues to Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates and Wild Ducks Flying Backwards, Robbins has, in over forty years’ worth of bestselling books, been our premier counter-culture chronicler and irreverent storyteller. Now the singular voice that has taken us so convincingly into the worlds of hitchhiking cowgirls and born-again monkeys shares perhaps the most colorful story of all: his own. Unfolding as a series of snapshots recording events as unlikely and bizarre as any in his novels, TIBETAN PEACH PIE: A True Account of an Imaginative Life is Robbins’s version of a life well lived.

“This is not an autobiography,” Robbins writes in the preface. “God forbid! Autobiography is fueled by ego and I could make a long list of persons whose belly buttons I’d rather be contemplating than my own….I’d like to think TIBETAN PEACH PIE isn’t a memoir either, although it waddles and quacks enough like a memoir to be mistaken for one if the light isn’t right. What it is more precisely is a sustained narrative composed of the absolutely true stories I’ve been telling the women in my life—my wife, my assistant, my fitness trainer, my yoga teacher, my sisters, my agent, et al—over many years, and which at their insistence I’ve finally written down….If TIBETAN PEACH PIE doesn’t read like a normal memoir, that may be because I haven’t exactly led what most normal people would consider a normal life. (My editor claims some of this stuff is so nuts even I couldn’t have made it up.) Moreover, my writing style is my writing style, whether it’s in the service of fact or fiction: a pileated woodpecker is a pileated woodpecker no matter if it roosts with the ducks.”

During a kaleidoscopic life that began with his North Carolina birth and Virginia childhood, Robbins has been a poet, a meteorologist, a soldier, a journalist, an art critic, a radio DJ and, of course, a world famous novelist. His particular, sometimes peculiar, life journey has taken him from Depression-era Appalachia to the West Coast during the psychedelic Sixties to the studios and bedrooms of bohemian America “before technology voted privacy out of office.” He roved the world “before ‘homeland security’ threw a wet blanket on travel”—from pre-Islamic Timbuktu to the halls of New York publishing. Along the way he has rubbed elbows with the famous and infamous, from Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsburg to William F. Buckley to Charles Manson.