I Got Mine: Confessions of a Midlist Writer is the memoir of Nichols's extraordinary life, as seen through the lens of his writing. Everything that went into making him a writer and eventually found an outlet in his work - his education, family, wives, children, friends, enemies, politics, and place - is told from the point of view of his daily practice of writing.
Beginning with his first novel, The Sterile Cuckoo, published in 1965 when he was just twenty-four, Nichols shares his highs and lows: his ambivalent relationship with money; his growing disenchantment with the hypocrisy of capitalism; and his love-hate relationship with Hollywood - including the years-long struggle of working with director Robert Redford on the film version of TheMilagro Beanfield War, which was filmed around Truchas and featured many of Nichols's northern New Mexico neighbors.
Throughout I Got Mine Nichols spins a shining thread connecting his lifelong engagement with progressive political causes, his passionate interest in and identification with ordinary people, and his deep connection to the land.
At the time of his death in 2023, John Nichols had published eleven works of nonfiction and thirteen novels, including the classic The Milagro Beanfield War. A resident of Taos since the 1960s, his recent works include The Annual Big Arsenic Fishing Contest! A Novel; On Top of Spoon Mountain; and My Heart Belongs to Nature: A Memoir in Photographs and Prose (all from UNM Press .
“[I Got Mine] shines with the author’s bright spirit and never-failing sense of humor.”—Sallie Bingham, Pasatiempo “A rich, earthy memoir.”—Albuquerque Journal
“Touching, hilarious, and candid. . . . A book of hard-bitten, determined philosophy.”—The Paper
“Nichols leaves us with solid advice for the writer and a nostalgic rally for himself.”—Taos News
“This is an intimate portrait of a man as writer. No other work, or person, can look back at the whole of John Nichols’ life as John himself can. It’s a book less about the craft of writing than what it feels like to try to live an ethical life as an artist. It is a beautifully tangled and complex story—a work that feels both intensely considered and as casual as someone talking to you over the kitchen table at two in the morning.”—Paul Skenazy, author of Temper CA
“John Nichols is a master storyteller, a man possessed of a gift for prose metaphor unsurpassed in his generation.”—V. B. Price, author of The Orphaned Land: New Mexico’s Environment Since the Manhattan Project
