Rest in peace, buddy

Some thoughts about my friend Gabe Hudson—a great writer, fearless truth-teller, and champion for writers everywhere

I was cleaning dog shit off the sole of a tennis shoe when I found out that my friend Gabe had died. There’s a dark joke in there somewhere, one I’m sure Gabe would appreciate. But I don’t have the heart to find the joke right now—a feeling I’m sure Gabe, who always led with his heart, would understand.

I first came across Gabe Hudson on Twitter. On a platform where everyone seemed to be a self-proclaimed expert on everything, Gabe stood out to me with regular tweets that asked: does anyone know what’s going on?

I replied to some of those tweets, and Gabe always wrote back. But my interactions with Gabe on Twitter weren’t unique. It didn’t matter if you had a blue check mark or zero followers, Gabe wrote back to everyone, not out of obligation, I later realized, but out of a profound sense of our shared humanity. Gabe didn’t just care about people in the abstract, he cared deeply about every single person he ever shared a moment with, and he cared just as deeply about people he’d never meet.

We met for real this summer when Gabe moved his podcast, Kurt Vonnegut Radio, to Substack. Gabe had interviewed a lot of writers who loom large in the literary world and public discourse. Molly Jong-Fast. Merve Emre. Maggie Smith. Charles Yu. Tod Goldberg. Sam Lipsyte. Akhil Sharma. Sari Botton.

On Substack, Gabe reached out to my friend Alex Dobrenko, and then Alex’s Kaufmanesque nemesis Mike Sowden. Alex and Mike are both great writers, and they’ve both emerged as big deals on a growing platform that Gabe was working hard to learn. Reaching out to Alex and Mike made sense to me. But then Gabe reached out to me for an interview, and two thoughts collided in my head: holy shit and why me?

Our interview took ten hours. That’s not an exaggeration. We talked for ten hours over the course of two nights. We covered a lot of ground, but it felt like we still had so much ground to explore. Awkwardly, sounding a little like a teenager asking another teenager if they wanted to be friends, Gabe asked if he could call me sometime just to chat.

“Sure, I’d like that a lot.”

“You have time?” Gabe asked, as if leaving me an out I had no intention of taking.

I explained that freelance writing was slow for me at the moment, that my wife was in the middle of a job search, that aside from game nights with friends, or the occasional movie or meal out, our social calendar wasn’t exactly full at the moment.

“You are around,” Gabe said, emphasizing the last word with a booming, elongated voice.

I was around, and for the next few months, I came to know Gabe’s voice intimately. We spoke every week, usually for three or four hours at a time. Gabe always made it a point to ask, “how you doin’, buddy?” I understood, without Gabe needing to explain it, that this wasn’t small talk, it was personal talk, where every experience and feeling I shared was met with love and compassion. Everyone should have a friend like Gabe.

We also talked about big things. When it came to the big topics, Gabe was here for it, as they say.

Books were a frequent topic. Gabe read everything. If I mentioned a book that Gabe hadn’t read, I felt like the student who stumped the master, but that didn’t happen often.

We talked a lot about one of Gabe’s favorite topics: Generation X. “You’re in two camps,” he told me, “culturally, you’re an Xer, but your formative life experiences are sorta Millennial.” Gabe’s advice: use my experience as a member of a relatively small micro-generation to bridge the gap between old and young. Good advice for finding humanity in digital spaces that are often inhumane.

Mass shootings were another topic we discussed in depth. Gabe’s voice on mass shootings was informed by his experience as a rifleman in the Marines, his vocation as a teacher, his insistence on truth-telling, and above all, his humanity. Gabe had important things to say about mass shootings—the fact that society chose to ignore Gabe’s voice only drove him to speak louder. Gabe’s courage was inspiring.

We also talked a lot about war, weaving together threads of history, politics, hatred, violence, and humanity. In those conversations, it felt like we were a pair of blind men, desperate to understand the shape and dimensions of the elephant called war, so that we might drag it into the light, expose its ugly truths, and march it toward a new place called peace.

Maybe it’s fitting that our friendship was book-ended by the war in Ukraine, which had been raging for more than a year by the time we met, and the war in Gaza, which erupted a few weeks before Gabe died. But the real through line of those conversations was this theme: America’s forever wars. Gabe was working toward something on that front—a great American novel, I think—that would explain the horrors we had inflicted on others, how those horrors had come back to haunt us, and why, if we didn’t tell the truth about those horrors, we’d find ourselves in an even darker place.

Unlike mass shootings—a horror that’s partly a function of America’s forever wars—the forever wars themselves aren’t something we talk about much. But Gabe talked about them a lot, and while it’s natural and true to say his voice will be missed there, it’s important to honor Gabe’s legacy by speaking out and breathing new life into a conversation America prefers to ignore.

Comedy, a subject close to both our hearts, was another frequent topic of my conversations with Gabe. I learned that Gabe had a mission for the new incarnation of Kurt Vonnegut Radio. The idea was to fuse the worlds of literature and comedy. Doing so, Gabe explained, would help make literature more relevant and vital to a mass culture drunk on digital dopamine distractions, but it would also give comedy its due as a true art form.

We talked a lot about the comedians Gabe wanted to interview on Kurt Vonnegut Radio. Each comic Gabe set his sights on was hilarious, but the thing he really wanted to speak with them about was truth-telling. Kurt Vonnegut, Gabe’s hero, wasn’t exactly a novelist in Gabe’s estimation, he was a very funny joke writer who told the truth and spun those truths into stories we call novels. Coming at it from the opposite angle, Gabe saw comedians not as clownish purveyors of low culture but as honest artists in a dishonest world.

Gabe was passionate about truth-telling. Actually, he insisted on it. He took pride in championing truth-tellers. He reminded everyone that “truth-telling is infectious.” It takes courage to tell the truth, and too many of us lack that courage. I lack that courage, sometimes. But whenever I find the courage to speak the truth, it’s because I hear Gabe’s voice urging me on. Truth-telling is infectious—meaning that the truth-teller may feel lonely, but they are not alone.

Gabe’s voice was powerful, but he spoke with a combination of strength and tenderness I’ve never heard before and don’t imagine I’ll ever hear again. Gabe brought that voice everywhere—to our personal talks, to the big topics that were his life’s work, and to various writing communities, including the last one he joined on Substack.

One of the striking things to me about Gabe’s time on Substack is that he helped so many writers see themselves and their work in terms that were clarifying and helpful. Gabe had a gift for explaining you to you, I’ve heard so many members of the Substack writing community say. He gave that gift freely and with generosity. He gave that gift to me in every conversation we had.

Our rambling ten-hour conversation for Kurt Vonnegut Radio was a function our mutual passions, my endless struggles to apply concise labels to my work, and Gabe’s relentless curiosity to understand where a writer was coming from. Gabe cut the interview down to twenty-six minutes, and while it was choppy in places because Gabe was teaching himself to edit audio, his insights changed my writing career in profound ways that I’m still coming to terms with.

“Did I get you right?” Gabe asked me after he published the interview.

I assured Gabe that he had gotten me right, and even better, that he had also helped me clarify so many things about my writing. I didn’t ask Gabe to be my mentor, but he stepped right into that empty space in my work in the same way Gabe showed up for everything else—with love, tenderness, respect, understanding, and ferocious writing chops.

Gabe gave me his time, and he took his time with me. When I struggled to write a professional bio for my creative writing—a constant source of frustration for me and an irritating irony for a humorist working in the ambiguous genre called autofiction—Gabe rolled up his sleeves and got to work.

“Send me what you have,” he insisted.

I sent Gabe crap. The next day, Gabe sent me back gold. Then, as comedy writers do, Gabe sent me a dozen alt lines for buttons to close out my bio. Some were right, some a little off, but all of Gabe’s alts were funny as hell.

Gabe’s generosity was noteworthy, even by the high standards of mentorship and friendship, but Gabe’s true generosity revealed itself after his death. So many writers on Substack and elsewhere described similar experiences with Gabe Hudson that I doubt we’ll ever know his true impact. What I do know is that I’m better for knowing Gabe, even if our friendship was far too brief. I also know that writers and readers, and the world itself, are better because Gabe was here and because he left us his words.

Maybe in that way, Gabe isn’t truly gone. Maybe, to borrow from Kurt Vonnegut’s writing in Slaughterhouse Five, it’s a mistake to be sad about losing Gabe because we haven’t really lost him.

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist…

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “so it goes.”

So it goes, Gabe…

Further reading about Gabe Hudson

A really good Los Angeles Times obituary.

John Warner, a former colleague of Gabe’s at McSweeney’s, wrote a wonderful remembrance of Gabe and his work. Here’s that post.

McSweeney’s is collecting memories of Gabe from friends, family, and colleagues in a post fittingly titled: “JUST SAY THE WORD, AND I’LL BRING MY WHOLE HEART TO ANYTHING”

Let’s remember Gabe

Usually, I end ever Situation Normal post with some discussion questions, but there’s only one thing on my mind: Gabe. If you knew Gabe, or knew his work, or even if you just interacted with him once on the internet, please tell us something about Gabe.