Tucson author Richard Grant pens new book about Arizona

Author Richard Grant was born in Malaysia and spent his childhood in Kuwait and London, but he’s lived in Tucson longer than anywhere else. In the early 1990s, he ended up here because it was warmer than his original destination of Santa Fe and he soon settled in. He launched a career as a freelance magazine writer for Esquire, Men’s Journal and other publications and wrote books such as “American Nomads” and “God’s Middle Finger,” which documented his sometimes-hazardous journeys through Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range. 

In 2012, after a brief stint in New York City, he relocated to Mississippi, where he wrote the New York Times bestseller “Dispatches from Pluto” and “The Deepest South of All: Stories from Natchez, Mississippi.” In 2020, he returned to Tucson with his wife, Mariah, and young daughter, Isobel. 

In his latest book, “A Race to the Bottom of Crazy: Dispatches from Arizona” (Simon & Schuster), Grant explores Arizona’s wild places and political currents as well as his own family life. The book is set for release on Tuesday, Sept. 17, and Grant will be celebrating with a book release party that day from 5 to 7 p.m. at Moto Sonora, 1015 S. Park Ave.

Your new book is “A Race to the Bottom of Crazy: Dispatches from Arizona.” How did you land on that title?

A non-MAGA Republican, Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates, was talking about how his party was engaged in a race to the bottom with conspiracy theories. And that kind of stuck with me. And then I started finding out about our rural water laws, that you’re basically allowed to ransack the aquifer. And then that also seemed like a race to the bottom. And then I just put the race to the bottom of crazy as a way of linking those two things together.

You moved back to Tucson after about a decade in Mississippi in early 2020, just in time for the COVID outbreak, which of course changed everything for everybody. But aside from that, how had Tucson had changed in your absence?

The air wasn’t as clean as I remembered it, I assume because about 200,000 people have moved here since we were gone. The cost of living was through the roof – the real estate market had gone berserk. One reason why I lived in Tucson for 25 years because it used to be cheap to live here. That seemed to be no longer the case. There was also F-bomb bumper stickers everywhere that didn’t used to be here. The driving was more aggressive. There just seemed to be an uptick in belligerence.

In the book, you talk about how much you love the desert and the outdoors. Was that part of what drew you back?

Yeah, it was. Wanting to introduce our daughter to the Arizona outdoors was a major part of it. I also missed the food, missed the chili kick in the food, and missed old friends. And I’ve spent more of my life in Tucson than anywhere else in the world. So, it was kind of like a homecoming for me.

You write about your nomadic lifestyle, especially before you were married and had a daughter, to whom the book is dedicated. How much has fatherhood changed who you are and your priorities?

It’s been a dramatic change. I used to spend a lot of time running around risky places in the world, like the Sierra Madre in Mexico and Central Africa and Haiti. But the father’s No. 1 job is to stay alive, right? So just don’t take risks with my life anymore. The biggest mistake I could make would be to throw my life away on some like risky adventure in a far-off place.

Do you miss that?

Yeah, sometimes I miss the excitement and the stimulation of kind of living on the edge and trying to make sense of where you are at the same time as you’re trying to stay alive. It’s invigorating, in a sense.

You reveal a lot about your friendship with longtime Tucson reporter and author Chuck Bowden in this book. Talk a little about his impact on you and your career.

He was kind of a mentor to me – and not solely me, a lot of other people too, that he was very generous with his time and his connections and his insights. He’s the person that made me take writing more seriously. I basically started out writing as a way to avoid getting a proper job. It was a way to travel and have a pretty good time and be my own boss. And through seeing what he did with writing, and the way he talked about it and the voluminous amount of reading that he did, he kind of instilled in me the idea that books matter. And if you’ve got the talent for it, you ought to do your damn best with it.

In the process of doing the book. you spent some time with some of Arizona’s more radical Republicans, such as former Oro Valley lawmaker, Mark Finchem, who lost his 2022 race for Arizona secretary of state by more than 100,000 votes. But now he appears headed back to the state Legislature, this time from Prescott. What did you take away from those encounters?

I met Paul Gosar and Mark Finchem and some of their supporters. I’m just glad to meet them face to face. More than anything else, you look at Finchem’s Twitter feed or something like that, and it’s just easy to lose track of the fact that it’s just a person with his own views that I disagree with. But the thing that struck me, that I put in the book, was that I read this essay by Richard Hofstadter that was written in 1964, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” and he was just describing Finchem and the MAGA movement. It was the best description I’ve read, but it was written in 1964, so I also thought Finchem was part of this long tradition of paranoid, frightening American politics.

There’s a lot of personal stuff in the book. Was it challenging to put so much of yourself on the page?

I don’t want to write another book about myself, let me put it that way. You’re spilling your guts and writing about your family and your marriage and your deepest thoughts and fears. I don’t necessarily want to go through that again.

What do you hope readers take away from the book?

I hope that it’s informative and entertaining. If I haven’t kept you turning the pages and being entertained, then I failed. It’s not supposed to be all information. It’s supposed to be a fun read, I wanted to get across the ugly, the beautiful, the awe-inspiring, the safe, the twisted, the depraved, the whole enchilada of whatever Arizona is.

This Q&A has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.