Tristan Taormino mentions Uncle Tom

[Erik T. Burns]

https://jezebel.com/tristan-taormino-sex-writer-memoir-1850818210

I love that your uncle Thomas Pynchon makes some cameos in the book, as he
has on The Simpsons.

He’s known to elude the media. Like, the photograph they run is his college
yearbook photo from Cornell. He is notoriously very, very private, perhaps
one of the great reclusive literary minds of our time. This gets back to
the issue of one, not capitalizing on that relationship, which would be
shitty, and two, not wanting to violate his privacy. And of course, I know
things about him. This isn’t in the book, but at some point he lived with
my mom and me. He was like, between places or something, and so he lived
with us when I was a baby, when I was young. Especially when I was younger,
I had a lot of contact with him. The truth is, he did stand out to me in my
family as the most similar to me. He was a weirdo and he was eccentric and
he was brilliant and he was affectionate in a way that none of the other
people on that side of my family were. I felt drawn to him just
automatically. That’s why he is identified in my book as Uncle Tom, because
to me, he’s Uncle Tom.

Are you still in touch?

Yeah, I sent him the book. I look forward to hearing from him.