Amy Gamerman to Give Book Talk at Old Lyme Library
OLD LYME–Journalist Amy Gamerman’s first book has its origin story in the Crazy Mountains, a freestanding range of windy Montana peaks where one billionaire purchased 44,000 unspoiled acres and tilted at windmills to keep them that way.
Gamerman, a decades-long resident of Old Lyme and established Wall Street Journal contributor, traced the book’s genesis to a tour of oil and gas tycoon Russell Gordy’s Montana in 2017. That’s when Gordy told Gamerman, who was there to write a profile on the prolific landowner, about a neighboring rancher with plans for a wind farm that could sully the paradise stretching from the Yellowstone River to the spiky crests of The Crazies.
But the smallholding rancher to the south declined Gordy’s offer to buy him out.
The seemingly tangential anecdote stayed with Gamerman “like an itch” long after Gordy’s profile was published in the Journal’s luxury real estate section, she said. The urge to scratch wouldn’t quit.
Who was this rancher, she recalled wondering. What was it like to say “no” to Gordy, a man with so much money and influence? And whatever happened with the wind farm?
“There was something that happened out in the shadow of those Crazy Mountains when I was walking around with Russell Gordy, and he told me the story of his neighbor,” she said.
That “something” is The Crazies: The Cattleman, the Wind Prospector, and a War Out West, published in January after years of exhaustive research into what publisher Simon & Schuster labeled as a “ruggedly beautiful western for a warming plant.”
It’s the account of several billionaires and the fifth-generation rancher struggling to make a living off the land. It’s also the legend of those who got there first, and an allegory about what comes next in an isolated landscape that cannot hide from rising temperatures and powerful storms.
Gamerman will discuss the book at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday in Old Lyme’s Phoebe Griffin Noyes Library. All proceeds from copies sold that evening will go to the local library.
Stranger than Fiction
Gamerman, a fiction lover at heart, said wide ranging interviews with colorful personalities and drama-laden courtroom transcripts helped turn her journalism into a tale that reads like a novel.
She characterized it as liberating to get out of her own head by mining the stories of others.
“Here’s the thing,” she said. “I don’t feel like I have a great imagination. And this story had so many outrageous twists and turns I wouldn’t have had the balls to invent.”
She credited a significant amount of the book’s success to painstaking research into the history of Montana and the people drawn there. Some of that work was done while the deepest throes of the pandemic rendered the world remote.
The months-long quarantine was an “extraordinary gift in disguise” that gave her the time and space to focus on backstory, she said. With research came an understanding of the external forces, some of them as old as the land itself, that drove the characters’ personal decisions.
“You couldn’t really understand the present-day conflict without understanding the past,” she said.
She also came to know, for the first time, the immediate dangers of climate emergency.
Gamerman described the billionaire trophy ranchers depicted in the book as consumed by the notion of the unspoiled landscape, even as their resistance to change threatens the region’s continued existence – and the livelihood of the working ranchers who depend on it.
She cited an epic drought and wildfires that played out “in real time” as she wrote the book.
“There were moments where I felt like these guys were admiring the view from the deck of the Titanic,” she said.
Late Bloomer
Gamerman, educated at Yale University in New Haven and Cambridge University in England, worked at a news wire service in Washington D.C. and then as arts and culture reporter for the Wall Street Journal before stepping back to raise her children in Old Lyme. She joined the newspaper’s emerging Mansion section as a contributor more than a decade ago.
Gamerman’s four children with bestselling author and acclaimed journalist Kevin Conley range from 25 to 18 years old.
The author, 61, called herself a late bloomer.
She recalled lamenting her delayed arrival to book publishing in a conversation with writer and audio host Anna Sale, known for the Death, Sex and Money podcast. Sale also narrates the audio version of the book.
Gamerman credited Sale with reminding her that she was able to write the book because of the lifetime of personal and professional experiences that led to it.
“And it’s true,” she said. “I had to draw on everything I had.”