Interviewed by Christine Rice
In his memoir, The Distance Between (Nebraska, 2019), Timothy Hillegonds trains his unflinching gaze on addiction, white male privilege, toxic masculinity, and failed relationships. Hillegonds doesn’t try to win the reader over with excuses for past behavior but instead finds the language to excavate then examine his actions with ruthless precision. Instead of allowing himself to become symbolic of any one vice, Hillegonds captures the struggle—in all its grief and beauty—of reckoning with a difficult past.
Christine Rice: Congratulations on being one of the Guild Literary Complex’s 2019 30 Writers to Watch.
Timothy J. Hillegonds: Thanks, Christine. And right back at you! What an unexpected surprise, right?
CR: Completely unexpected. The Guild is an excellent Chicago nonprofit.
TH: And, real quick, before we start here, I just want to take a moment to thank you for reading The Distance Between. I’m sure you’re insanely busy like the rest of us, so it truly means a great deal that you spent some time with it.
CR: It was my pleasure. Truly. Because interviews take so much time, I’m not able to interview every author whose work I admire—so I’m thrilled that this worked out.
This memoir seems so right for this moment in history. Among other things, you describe—with a good deal of bracing and clear-headed honesty about your past—the destructiveness of destructive behaviors.
You write:
“…but I am deeply sorry for the man that I was and the hurt that I caused. What I do understand, though, is that apologies don’t always accomplish a whole lot, and that leaves me unsure of what to do with my history. I don’t want to be defined by my worst mistakes, and writing a book that explores many of them, in a way, sets me up for that, but as a writer, as a man trying to inhabit a healthier, less harmful definition of masculinity, I know no other path to confronting the past than to write about my experience of becoming the man I never intended to become. This book is an attempt, however flawed, to understand my mistakes, to keep on nodding terms with the person I used to be, so as to never again be the man I was.”
How did you find your way to the page? At what moment, in your recovery, did you think: I want to be a writer? When did you think: I want to write this all down. Besides a love of reading to your little sister and daughter, you didn’t mention a desire to write. When did this change?
TH: Your question is pretty insightful, because it assumes that it was in recovery that I finally came to terms with the fact that I wanted to be a writer, and that’s exactly right. Which isn’t to say that I wasn’t drawn to writing in my early years, or that I didn’t feel like the compulsion to write was in me, because it definitely was. But the thing about writing is that it takes discipline and the thing about being an addict/alcoholic is that discipline is hard to come by. Actively using is just about survival—about surviving this moment, and then that moment, and then the moment after that. There was no room for reflection, or consideration, because I was always on to the next all-encompassing crisis.
But when I finally got sober in 2005, writing became a critical part of my recovery. I got sober at Hazelden (now Hazelden Betty Ford) in Center City, Minnesota, and it was a writing-intensive recovery program. For the first time in who-knows-how-long I sat in a chair with a pencil in my hand and was forced to confront myself on the page. I had to write a frightening array of things—how I felt and who I had hurt— and I had to fumble my way through some pretty eye-opening math in an effort to quantify all the money and time I’d lost to drinking and drugs. 
I think now that it was those clumsy-but-honest sentences I wrote at that worn-out, wooden desk inside Hazelden that helped me find my way (back?) to writing. And then, after rehab, when my entire life seemed completely and utterly irredeemable, I continued writing, beginning a blog to chronicle what it was like to try and put my life back together. So I guess from the onset, writing was woven into the fabric of my recovery.
CR: The Chicago lit scene has a big, generous heart. In “Acknowledgements,” you mention two writers I adore and admire including Barrie Jean Borich and Michele Morano.
What specifically did you learn from those two writers? And what did you learn from being part of the Chicago writing scene?
TH: This is a tough question to answer, because so much of what I’ve learned about writing, and most of the things I feel like I do well in writing, came from Michele and Barrie. Barrie taught me about specificity and lyricism and “perhapsing” and Michele taught me how to think about time in memoir, and how to appropriately balance scene and reflection, and, really, how to think about writing. Michele, who I’m proud to call my mentor as well as my dear friend, has an uncanny ability to drill right into the core of what’s working and not working in a piece of writing, and somehow do it in a way that feels uplifting and compassionate and kind.
When I was working on The Distance Between, Michele was unbelievably generous with her time, and when she gave me feedback, which was often, she was always willing to ask the hard questions, to bring a new perspective, to push me deeper into the material. Without Michele’s insight, this book simply wouldn’t exist.
CR: In the beginning of The Distance Between, you describe your love of inline skating.
You’ve just launched off a ramp, over a line of 15 people, and you write:
“…And then I was laughing, too, the crowd a frenzy of clapping hands and screaming voices and pumping fists. Dan and I continued to laugh, couldn’t stop laughing, because this is what we did, and this thing we did was ours—and because today the world was limitless, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, we could not do.”
A year or so later, you move to Colorado to snowboard. There’s no way to describe the feeling you get when you are in the air or on the slope, right? The risk involved. The little triumphs. The massive failures. Are the risks involved in writing similarly thrilling?*
*I raced slalom and GS in high school and vividly remember that feeling.
TH: If you raced slalom and GS in high school, then you totally get where I was coming from! That feeling of being right at the threshold of control, when it’s all perfectly chaotic and everything—through some weird sort of alchemy—has started to work together, your body, the mountain, the icy air that’s somehow helping you hold your line. . .not a day goes by that I don’t think about those moments. There was always so much satisfaction in losing myself in that flow state. While writing doesn’t give me exactly the same feeling, I’ve definitely reached a similar flow state while writing before, though it doesn’t happen very often. There have been a couple of times, though, when I’ve sat down and essays have poured out of me in just the right way, with just the right words, and time has melted into the walls around me, and I think I’m somewhere else, some place that seems to exist in a reality outside of this one. I know—it sounds nuts. But as a writer yourself, I think you know what I mean.
CR: Those are good days.
TH: As for the risk, there’s definitely a thrill in writing, but at least for this book, it’s been more fear than thrill. In The Distance Between, I’m unpacking some of the worst parts about the young man I was, the young man who was addicted and angry and abusive, and I know there will be people who simply don’t want to hear it, people who’ve had experiences with men like me and who might feel angry or annoyed or just plain tired of it. I’m sort of wired to be a people pleaser, so thinking about that scares the hell out of me.
That said, writing this book taught me (and in some cases reinforced) some of the same lessons I learned in recovery: mainly, that it’s often in the scariest, most difficult, most uncomfortable places that real progress is made. Change only happens when one becomes truly vulnerable, and being truly vulnerable is hard. But it’s also absolutely necessary.
CR: At one point in the memoir, you move from Chicago to Colorado. On the plane, looking out the window, you write:
“Or maybe none of that mattered and what I really needed was to ride, to feel that Burton deck under my feet and lean into the mountains, into gravity, and fall away from everyone and everything that held me back.”
And later, in that same paragraph:
“…I imagined myself in that new world, successful and happy, independent and thriving, high above the tree line with a snowboard strapped to my boots, leaning hard into champagne powder turns.”
Of course, as you mention at the end of the book, changing location doesn’t mean that the person will change.
You write:
“So I did what I always did: drank and drugged myself into a place where—at least for a while—I didn’t remember all the things I couldn’t forget. I strained to erase the history I’d created—the violence, the abandonment—but no matter how much alcohol or ecstasy or cocaine I put in my system, erasure was elusive and, ultimately, not possible.”
Your writing is lyrical and you are able to dovetail that lyricism into gritty detail, bracing honesty. In what ways did you struggle to tell the story? And then, at what point did you think, “This is coming together”?
TH: It was definitely a challenge, that’s for sure—for so many reasons. Emotionally, I spent so much time with the old me, the version of myself that I so often wish I could forget, that I had to take long breaks and make sure my sobriety was still on solid ground. I went to AA meetings and spent hours hitting the heavy bag and talked endlessly with my wife, Erin, who taught me that rethinking masculinity is a daily practice and something I need to work on with the same commitment I bring to my sobriety.
Writing the book was also a challenge because even though I was writing about things that happened in the late ‘90s, life was, of course, still happening, and my daughter Haley was growing up, and I was navigating my relationship with her. I spent years flying back and forth from Chicago to Colorado, establishing a relationship with her, and then when she was seventeen, Haley came to live with us for a time. It was surreal to be writing what amounts to Haley’s origin story while she was in the next room, and while she was navigating some of the same struggles in her own life that I was writing about in mine.
It wasn’t until right near the end of the last major revision that I finally looked at it and thought, “okay, this thing is really taking shape.” Of course, my very next thought after that was: “This whole thing is a mess and you should have done something else with your life.” I stuck with it, though. And I’m glad I did.
CR: I ached for your mom, for both your parents. Even at your worst, you portrayed them—on the page—with such tenderness.
TH: I like that word, “tenderness,” because it feels like a good word to describe how they treated me most of the time. Even at their angriest, and when they were most disappointed in me, there was a tenderness in how they dealt with me. Now, as a father with a twenty-one-year-old daughter who’s had some challenges and made some mistakes that were difficult for me to watch, I’ve tried to apply that same tenderness. I think we can all benefit from a little more of it, you know?
CR: Agreed.
As a younger man, you took what you wanted. Acted the way you wanted. By moving west you exercised your personal Manifest Destiny—your actions were, in your mind, justified and in a way, inevitable. This memoir is a reflection of and reckoning with the privilege of being a young white man. When you were in the throes of that privilege, you didn’t see it. At what point did you start to see it?
TH: I wish I could say that I began to see it a decade ago, but it wasn’t until fairly recently that I started to put all those pieces together. One of the biggest turning points for me was when the video of Laquan McDonald was released. I watched it and was completely overwhelmed with emotion. The situation felt eerily similar to a situation I had in my life—one that I describe in the book—but the outcomes couldn’t have been any more different. I was an angry young white man running away from the police after crashing a car and I was tackled on the pavement and put in handcuffs. Laquan was an angry young Black man who broke into a couple of trucks and he was shot dead in the street. The juxtaposition told me a story about myself and America that I finally began to understand.
Once that reality was made apparent, my life changed in some pretty substantial ways. I began trying to look at everything through the lens of privilege, and the way I understood my story changed. The facts were still the same, but I saw that so much of my ability to recover stemmed from a privilege that I benefitted from even when I was unaware it existed. I now feel a very real responsibility to continue unpacking that privilege.
CR: I understand that you began writing this in 2014. In what ways have recent events—the #MeToo movement, the attention to systematic violence against people of color—shaped the final stages of this book?
TH: Both of those issues that you mention shaped the book in the sense that I understood my story differently—both throughout the revision process and as I buttoned up the final draft. The Preface and the After sections were the last parts of the book that I wrote, and I think waiting until the end allowed me to really spend some time unpacking what I had learned about the ways in which masculinity and whiteness have affected my life, and the lives of others. Perhaps more than anything, though, #MeToo has really made me yearn to be a different kind of man. All the stories I’ve heard and read, all the women I’ve talked to who have painful stories about their encounters with men—it’s all pushed me towards putting in real work at becoming a different kind of man trying to inhabit a different, healthier brand of masculinity. #MeToo has helped me come to the realization that change starts with me. The problem with men is also the problem with me. And I’m trying to address it the same way I address just about everything else: one day at a time.
CR: I’ve been thinking a lot about writing groups lately. In what ways did your writing group help you see this memoir more clearly? Or, in what ways did your writing group influence this memoir?
TH: I joined my writing group after I was pretty far into the book, so I never actually workshopped it with them. Nevertheless, even though they didn’t read The Distance Between, they helped me in myriad other ways, like giving me amazing feedback on just about every other essay I wrote during the time I was working on this book.
I did, however, attend the Iowa Summer Writing Festival in 2015 and spent two weeks in a memoir workshop led by the writer Hope Edelman. We all workshopped 250 pages of our manuscript and it was the first time anyone outside of Michele and Barrie had read a substantial portion of it. The feedback was absolutely critical. They saw things I simply couldn’t see because I was too close to it. I also got a real sense of how people might react to it. I was the youngest person in the room by quite a bit so it gave me some insight into how readers of different ages and demographics might respond. Of course, it was a much different book back then, but it gave me a sensibility and perspective that stayed with me until I completed it.
CR: What writers do you admire?
TH: In no particular order: Lacy M. Johnson, Melissa Febos, Tobias Wolff, Michele Morano, Barrie Jean Borich, Hope Edelman, Eula Biss, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, David Sedaris, Leslie Jamison, Jia Tolentino…the list is endless.
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MORE ABOUT TIMOTHY…
Timothy J. Hillegonds is the author of The Distance Between (Nebraska, 2019). His work has appeared in Salon.com, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Assay, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, River Teeth, Baltimore Review, Brevity, Under the Gum Tree, Hippocampus Magazine, The Fourth River, Midway Journal, RHINO, Bluestem Magazine, r.k.v.r.y. quarterly, and others.
Tim was nominated for a 2015 Illinois Arts Council Literary Award. In 2019, Tim was named by the Guild Literary Complex as one of their thirty “Writers to Watch.” He earned a Master of Arts in Writing and Publishing (MAWP) from DePaul University in Chicago and currently serves as a contributing editor for Slag Glass City, a digital journal of the urban essay arts. You can visit him online at timhillegonds.com.
