Interview: Hard living writer Robert Dean has gotten sober and his work is better than ever
Robert Dean is sober, home by eleven most nights, and still writes about the years he wasn’t. The author, reporter, and jack-of-all-trades commentator arrived in Austin after a lengthy stint in the gnarliest place in the United States – New Orleans. A place like Austin, despite its lingering issues, doesn’t even come close. Born in Chicago, Dean’s interests revolve around social issues, transgressive humorism, and an undying loyalty to the greats of hardcore punk and heavy metal. With roots in the likes of Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, and Jack Kerouac, the Midwestern raconteur immersed himself in a hard-living lifestyle to channel the antics of his literary heroes. Now, Dean has surrendered the bottle for the better part of two years. In his latest book, Red Eye, a collection of stories recounting world travels, drunken mistakes, and commentary about the best, and worst, parts of Austin, leads to a fulfilling life that leaves the barfly regrets behind – for good. We sat down with Robert Dean on 7th Street in downtown Austin to discuss his writing career, posting up in Austin, and the vices that come with them.
In his earlier essay collection, the epic Existential Thirst Trap, the whiskey-soaked, dive-bar conversations bring Dean’s now-past philosophies to center stage. There are stories of fugly strippers, downward spirals, love letters to Anthony Bourdain, and how playlists will never have the sentimental value of a tangible mixtape. “I wanted this [Red Eye] to be the logical next step. Thirst Trap was so drunk. All it was about was drinking. I wanted this to be the next step evolution of, like, I called out Metallica’s Garage Days EP in the beginning of this new one. I was just like, ‘Here’s this little thing, and see where we’re gonna go next.’” To drill down on what the drunk shit is – here’s a taste from a typical payday on the legendary Bourbon Street according to Dean.
“I always kept $60 to get wrecked with. It was the rule. After wandering the Quarter, I usually wound up on a Barstool at the end of the Abbey stick, down on lower Decatur. Jameson and PBR, the usual pair of handcuffs.” – Excerpt from the first chapter of ETT
When you’d run into him on Red River or any given watering hole in Austin, Dean would often be seen sitting on a barstool with a notepad, double-fisting whiskey and cheap beer, and conversing with his fellow regulars. Now, he’s aimed at other pastimes. A dramatic shift from two decades of benders that went, as he says, nowhere most of the time. “And those, like, once in a blue moon stories that we have, like, ‘that was a crazy fun night.’ Like, you get a couple of those. You get one for every 20 boring driving home drunk at 2:30 in the morning.
Mostly, he says, ‘By 11 o’clock, I’m going home.’ If there’s no reason to be out, I’m not going. We’re not getting into a secret Metallica show.”
Red Eye marks a shift. Dean now focuses on activities away from the bar scene. His home life is cleaner, he remains observant and sharp-tongued, but without the excess of whiskey. “I want to be better than everybody, and that’s not a disrespect to other people. That is just my own goals… If there’s a scale of David Sedaris here and Anthony Bourdain here, I want to be somewhere on that scale.”
This may come as a surprise given the discussed topics so far, but Dean is a father of two. His written work often falls into something hard to admit or explain to the young ones. Some might be skeptical of them reading such confessions, but Dean wants it all out in the open.
“I got a girlfriend who I intend to get married to, and I have my sons. I don’t want something out there that any one of those people feels embarrassed by. I’m not one of those people who are like ‘I don’t self-censor myself,’ but I also realize that there are other people at stake in my life who deal with my opinions and what I say. I think that that’s important to acknowledge, because again, even though she’s my ex, I still don’t want the mother of my children to feel like, ‘this guy that I have, I share two sons with, is an embarrassment for me,’ and just the same as my girlfriend, whose future is very tied to mine. I don’t want her to feel that way. And so, if my kids want to read it, everything that I put out there, I put out there with the willingness that I’m like, ‘All right, this is what it is, man.’ You know? And I hope to either entertain you, educate you, or at least make you laugh.”
Dean believes there’s no scientific way to teach writing. Though this perspective has cost him teaching work, his wisdom comes from experience, not classrooms. He once candidly admitted in an interview for a teaching position that he’d discourage students from relying on higher education to learn to write. “I went to the worst school when I wanted to write the news. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I hated school, so I avoided real college. So they gave me this one guy who taught me the absolute basics of how to write news. You could not have had a more basic training here: ‘Here’s how a news story should go for a TV broadcast.’ Everything else was literally just learning on the job. Every single thing I’ve ever done is learning from people and through just bits and pieces and just working at it.”
When aspiring writers put down words, they often feel they have to cater to a specific audience, depending on the subject matter, or a block in their brains that makes them feel they have to please everyone. Dean is long past this mental hurdle. To draw the lines together on this, he says that everyone takes something different from a piece of work. He refers to the famous music producer Rick Rubin’s recent The Creative Act to draw a comparison.
“So if you try to make something for people and people don’t react, you’re gonna be disappointed. But if you make this thing that you’re satisfied with, that you’re proud of, that you love, you can live with, that if it’s successful or it’s not, at least you’re happy with it. And I took that to heart because, you know, when I was writing my upcoming fictional book Rat Bastard, I originally just kept wanting it to be a hardcore crime thing, and in the first iterations it was very Scarface-Godfather. I knew I wanted it very Tarantino-like, but I was sucking his balls too much. And then I kept workshopping it, and I was like, ‘I’m funny.’ Why don’t I lean into all of my humor and make these people ridiculous? Why don’t I make these characters fun? Why don’t I make them just absolute fuck ups?”
Dean has roots in working-class cities like Chicago (native South Sider) and New Orleans, places with much older histories, and generations of poverty. Austin feels like it would be a drastic change for a blue-collar veteran like Robert Dean. There are no hurricanes, months-long stretches of blizzards, or cultural diversity that goes beyond being a hub for live music. “My least favorite place to write from out of the three is Austin. Because Austin is soft as baby shit. Those who struggle here aren’t the kind of struggle like in New Orleans. It’s not the same kind of struggle as Chicago, where a guy got laid off because he was a machinist, you know what I mean? I don’t think I have a favorite place to write from. I don’t think I’ve been there yet.”
On top of being a current event realist, Dean has good taste in food. He knows what he likes and what he doesn’t. Let’s face it: Austin isn’t a food town, no matter how hard it tries. Other places have deep ethnic histories, but whatever Austin had is gone now due to high rents and gentrification. “You get a couple of decent food options, but the good places close because they can’t afford rent when someone wants to open a purse shop. The bars are cool for meeting people, but those cool people are getting priced out as other people move here for work, then realize they don’t like it. The guy who’s been here 25 years has to move to Buda and hates it.”
Dean has lived and died by his lifelong dream to be a writer. And to say he’s never suffered from it would be an outright lie. “I truly don’t know what I would do if I weren’t writing. I just don’t know. I thought about that when I was trying to find jobs, and I was really in the doldrums. I almost killed myself in 2024 before I got my current job. And when I was really, really broke. Struggling. Greg from The Cosmic Clash helped me out because he would throw me a little bit of money to write stuff, and that kept me going. I was in a bad way, man. And I didn’t know how to do anything else. I don’t have a desire to do anything else. This is just my life. Now, if I didn’t get started writing, I probably would have just wound up being a city of Chicago garbage man. I always made that joke.”
In an age of misinformation and AI, we are fed a lot of bullshit. No one knows where to turn, who to believe, or what to trust. When weighing in on the weirdest part of being a writer in this day and age, Dean expressed his desire to tell an undeniable truth, no matter how daunting that might be. “We’ve normalized not seeing what your eyes tell you, and I think that’s really hard. That woman in Minnesota was clearly shot in the face. She was not driving into this guy. She was panicking while driving away. When you’re just two middle-aged, Midwestern lesbians who get caught up in this thing, they’re not going into this expecting to have people draw guns on them. They’re blowing their whistles thinking, ‘Fuck you.’ So then, when that happened, she panicked and tried to drive out of it, and he shot her. Most rational people would just go, ‘That’s wrong.’ Most people would get behind the same banner and go, ‘That’s wrong. Let’s all collectively agree on that.’ We can’t even do that anymore. We can’t agree when somebody gets murdered in front of us. People have to parse it like a partition and make it a thing. Everything is like that.”
As writers and artists age, one could argue that it’s a calling card to mentor those who came after them. When asked about his advice to young writers, Bukowski said: Drink, fuck, and smoke plenty of cigarettes. Dean would’ve probably said something similar four years ago, but that’s not him anymore. “Read a lot. Write a lot. Make mistakes, and just keep going. That’s all you can do. You just have to realize that this is for the love of the game, and if you’re trying to get rich off it, don’t do that. Just do it because you love it, and hopefully you hit a lick. That’s literally what I tell everybody. You just have to love it, and, I mean, take it from Bukowski, find what you love and let it kill you, because if you don’t love this, you can’t do it.”
I wanted to ask him more questions, but we had a punk show to get to a few blocks over. It’s good to know his love of late-night rock and roll hasn’t gone to the wayside.
Red Eye by Robert Dean is out now for $5.75 on Amazon. Cheaper than a McDonald’s Happy Meal and most other things. Buy it today.
All photos by Justin Clark
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