I dedicated this last book to a friend I grew up with named Paco. He had strawberry-blond hair, a face that glowed like sunrise, and could absolutely skin an electric guitar. Paco worked on fishing boats in Alaska for a while and at the end of those four-month trips he’d step off the boat and they’d hand him a check for twenty, sometimes $30,000. One night he showed up in front of my dorm when I was in college and he’d bought an old ’80s model stretch limousine and we rode all around the mountains blasting the theme song from “Cheers” through busted speakers laughing like tickled children.

After 9/11, Paco joined the Marine Corps and served multiple deployments to Iraq. There are pictures of him standing in the moon dust over there, cigarette dangling in his teeth, holding up an M-249 SAW machine gun like he’s Kerry King playing a B.C. Rich guitar for Slayer. There’s another photo of prisoners they’d taken, on their knees, hands bound at their backs, black sacks over their faces, Paco standing between them with his thumbs up like The Fonz. I don’t know what all Paco saw on the front lines of combat or how it affected him. But what I do know is that when he came home, one day he walked into his house, shot his brother, shot his father, and killed himself. What I do know is that when the news told the story, I watched how they stripped my friend of his humanity like he was trash. I watched helplessly and all I could think was that if I listened hard enough I could still hear the echo of his laughter as we rode through the mountains in that beat-up limousine.

Maybe that’s why what I read in a trade review recently struck me so hard. The reviewer didn’t like my book, and that’s all right. A whole lot of people don’t like my books, and that’s perfectly OK. My books aren’t for everyone. This reviewer didn’t like what he called my “Southern Poverty Law Center photorealism.” This is what got me, though. He wrote that I should “leave the peeling trailers, come down out of the hollers, and try writing about people for a change.” He actually italicized that word, people, to be sure and say that what lives in those trailers, what finds itself in a world consumed by hopelessness, addiction, and violence, those aren’t people at all. I’m not sure what he thinks men like my grandfather, boys like Darrell, Smokey, Bubba and Lyndon, men like Donny, like Paco are, other than to use his own words, “trailer trash.”

But what he misses is this. These are people who just like everyone else experience happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. These are people who love and hate, people who cry their eyes out when they lose someone close, people who cry their eyes out when they laugh so hard they keel over, people who’d sell the last thing they had to put food on the table, people who work eighty hours a week to break even. These are people who’d strangle the life out of a man who dared stand in front of their children and say a word like trash like he had any idea what their life was worth. When I think about my family, my father and grandfather, when I think about all the boys I grew up with, all the ones who ended it, when I think about the hopeless, the addicts, the violence, I again remember that line from Maurice Manning. I loved the helpless people I loved, and maybe that’s why I can’t sit back while someone spits in their faces.