I came to the work of Harry Crews through word of mouth about the printed page. When I was still a teenager, I used to stay up late on the front porch of my friend’s house, behind a grocery store near downtown Asheville, North Carolina. We’d attempt to write songs, but mostly we’d get drunk and talk about writing and people who had figured out how to do it. One time, he was telling me about this fucked-up guy, Harry Crews, and his book A Feast of Snakes, a mid-seventies masterpiece set in Mystic, Georgia.

But I was really hooked when he told me about The Knockout Artist, a book that came a decade later and captured a kid named Eugene Talmadge Biggs who knocked himself out for paying spectators. The next morning, I ordered The Knockout Artist and A Feast of Snakes and a collection featuring his memoir, A Childhood, and the novels The Gypsy’s Curse and Car. I found myself immediately captured by Crews’s books. The dialogue felt so real, the Southernness so pronounced. It was like a warped version of where I was from—not things I had really seen, but scenes I could maybe imagine happening to friends I’d made, like my landlord Gary.

At the time, I was living in a mountain holler called Haw Creek. It was less a band house than a band compound, a couple of houses clustered together where some of my friends and bandmates all lived and worked and barbecued. Gary King owned and lived on the property with us. He’d rattle off dirty limericks in his kitchen and chain-smoke Pall Mall Blues while hooked up to oxygen. He’d park outside our house and lay on the horn until we came out just to talk shit. But he loved us as if we were his grandchildren, and he never raised the rent.

The pandemic came soon, so I stayed home and spent my time playing music and reading and writing. It was—up to that point and maybe even up to right now—the most devoted and formative songwriting phase of my life. Crews helped a lot.

My girlfriend at the time and Wednesday bandmate, Karly Hartzman, had gifted me several of his books that I didn’t have yet, some even signed. And I’d found an index of his interviews that became sort of a self-help guide for writing songs. Crews was born to tenant farmers in Bacon County, Georgia, a name he would have invented for his novels had it not already been real. He had almost no advantages as a young artist, a self-taught kid who had to be tough enough to keep going when no one cared. In those interviews, he said something about how any artistic pursuit involves your ability to withstand failure. That meant so much to me. Crews could seem like such a hard-ass, but that advice was vulnerable and real, a lesson from a guy who had realized that you have to put the idea on the page before you could even start to know if it’s any good.

This was around the time that I was writing what became Boat Songs, the album that led people outside of Asheville to pay a little attention to what I was doing. I knew these songs could look stupid on paper, but they felt right to me. Crews talked, too, about writing as an act of courage. In my own way, singing those songs felt a little like that. I needed that advice to make that music back then, and I still do.

Crews’s very specific, serious, and silly language was an inspiration, too. Someone is always “hustling his balls” in one of his books, and I think you could write an essay unpacking the implications of those three words. It became a goal to find phrases like that. I borrowed or stole from Crews, too. People love to quote a line from my song “Joker Lips” from Manning Fireworks, a batch of stuff that came near the end of my time at Haw Creek: “Every Catholic knows he could have been Pope.” Except, of course, I didn’t write it; Crews did. If you have a first edition of Gospel Singer, from William Morrow & Company in 1968, it’s on page 209, toward the middle. I like the way that passage ends, too: “Every man knows that his gift will set him free if he is just lucky enough. Or unlucky enough, depending upon your point of view.”

That bit reminds me of Body, a book that is, at least on the surface, about a bodybuilding standoff between Shereel Dupont and Marvella Washington. Marvella is an imposing Black woman from Detroit; Shereel is a small and sculpted white woman from Waycross, Georgia, so country that her name used to be Dorothy Turnipseed. But Body is barely about them at all. It is, instead, about a stubborn rivalry between Russell “Muscle” Morgan and Wallace “The Wall” Wilson, two over-the-hill coaches who, though still enormous, have only one way left to win a bodybuilding championship: via the women they now command. Muscle so controls Dupont that he forces her to change her name, regulates every drop of water she drinks, keeps her from her family, and determines when she needs to have sex with him. She just wanted to be his secretary; he must make her Ms. Cosmos.

Body is a ridiculous book, every action and name and figure so exaggerated it can feel like a caricature. But that is what makes Crews so compelling: Even inside this absurd universe, he manages to humanize everyone, to find the softness among these hard bodies. How loving can a man named Nail Head be? Very, it turns out. How can a freak-of-nature bodybuilder named Billy Bat find the family and romance he didn’t know he’d been looking for with Shereel’s sister, Earline, so addicted to food that she carries around spare pieces of fried chicken? Easily, it turns out. The bodybuilding competition that Crews depicts at the Blue Flamingo is a hilarious shitshow; because it’s Crews, it is also full of heart.

I should offer a warning: Like pretty much every Crews book, Body overflows with vile things. The relationship between the white Muscle and the Wall, who is Black, means there’s a lot of racist epithets, fired back and forth like volleys between North and South. And there’s a lot of demeaning sex where the woman has little to no say in the ordeal. It opens with sex so barbaric that Muscle breaks the hotel furniture; the hotel manager—a dork so ashamed of himself he won’t sleep with a woman because it would mean her seeing him without his terrible toupee—hires and fires a series of secretaries he calls only “Miss Beverly,” who give him blowjobs beneath his desk on demand. Crews is a little like a literary highlighter, occasionally using garish colors to show us that this is the way people really can be.

I am not out to spoil Body for you, but I should say something about the end. I’ve talked about how Crews likes to blow things up, to exaggerate and emphasize the messes we make. But the last three pages are a masterstroke of subtlety, a big reveal so nuanced and particular I had to read it a few times to make sure I understood. Every time I have revisited Body since, though, I’ve noticed new clues, breadcrumbs Crews was tossing out to lead us to the inevitability of the end. Following him there didn’t just make me a better reader and writer. Body helped me appreciate how most people—however strange their actions may seem to me—are mostly trying to do their best.

MJ Lenderman was born and raised in Asheville, North Carolina and is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. His albums include the critically acclaimed Boat Songs (2022) and his breakthrough release, Manning Fireworks (2024), which was named one of the year’s best albums by Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Paste, and The New Yorker.

From the foreword to Harry Crews’s Body, to be published by Penguin Classics on November 10.

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