Remembering Gabe Hudson
"What Gabe did for me (and what I now understand he did for so many) was to refuse to leave me behind."
Dear Identity Theory Readers,
We are saddened by the loss of writer/literary citizen/dog lover Gabe Hudson, who passed away last week.
Our longtime friend and contributor Christian Bauman bonded with Gabe over their common backgrounds as “soldier-writers” whose first books were published within a month of each other in 2002. He wrote this remembrance in today’s piece, “Gabe Hudson and the Lost Soldiers of Generation X”:
It took Gabe 15 years to write his second book, and based on what he told me it might be a decade before he was ready with a third. He seemed pretty grounded with that—it is what it is, after all, and don’t I know it—but I also remember one conversation where he equated it with casualty. “Some writers fly forward, dodging incoming like a dancer. And some go down. The question, Chris, is whether they stay down or not.”
What Gabe did for me (and what I now understand he did for so many) was to refuse to leave me behind, even though he considered himself somewhat left behind. It’s a ridiculous cliché, the wounded Marine crawling back to drag another casualty to safety. But that is exactly what he did. My guess is that in trying to save me, save us, he saw a potential path forward in saving himself. But the grateful saved don’t spend a lot of time questioning the motivations of the savior. Because it doesn’t matter. Gabe Hudson—always vulnerable, always worried about you—reached out a hand to me, to us, and was there in my hour of greatest need.
Revisit our conversation from 2002
On tour for his first novel, Dear Mr. President, Gabe Hudson had this to say to Robert Birnbaum in 2002:
What I discovered was that people in the publishing world and the editors at magazines were a really incredible group of conscientious and generous people. It has just been really amazing. You can't imagine how much some of these people care about the written word.
Gabe grew to exemplify the best of the literary and publishing world. To quote a tweet from Elizabeth Crane, “Be the Gabe Hudson you wish to see in the world.”
That is advice worth taking.
Fly forward,
Matt Borondy
Founding Editor
Identity Theory