When I was a teenager, I loved the book simply because Ignatius and his antics made me laugh as hard as my stepmom and her sisters once had. It’s easy to imagine how most of them responded to her plea to read a very long, brilliant manuscript written by her dead son. For years his mother hounded editors to consider the manuscript. Though written in the 1960s, A Confederacy of Dunces was published in 1980, eleven years after the suicide of John Kennedy Toole, who died in despair that he had failed to secure publication of his comedic opus. The large, unwieldy, hilarious novel is made 1,000 times more poignant by knowledge that its author died believing it, and himself, a failure. One should never approach such a tome without having experienced some loss, some sorrow of one’s own.

As I watched and listened, I remember thinking to myself: “As soon as I’m old enough, I’m going to read that damn book.”īy the time I was old enough for A Confederacy of Dunces, my stepmother was no longer related to me by marriage, and I rarely saw those delightful women I had once called my aunts.

I could hear my aunt’s echoing cackle coming down the phone line. And then my stepmom would share a passage herself, only she would have to take breaks from reading out loud to allow her fits of giggles to pass. My stepmother would listen as one of her sisters read her a passage from the book and then she would laugh and laugh. But I would stand nearby and listen to my glamorous young stepmother as she talked on the phone to any one of her sisters-she had a gaggle of them, my glorious new aunties, and it seemed they were all reading A Confederacy of Dunces, too. I also didn’t know the sad tale of this most hilarious novel and its author.

I was five years old, and didn’t know how to read yet. That must have been about when my stepmother started reading the book. In 1981, A Confederacy of Dunces by the late John Kennedy Toole won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction-a rare honor for a work of humor.

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