Jim Knipfel (pronounced Kah-nipfel) is an American novelist, autobiographer, and journalist.
A native of Wisconsin, Knipfel, who suffers from retinitis pigmentosa, is the author of three memoirs, Slackjaw, Quitting the Nairobi Trio, and Ruining It for Everybody; as well as two novels, The Buzzing, and Noogie's Time to Shine. He wrote news stories, film and music reviews, the crime blotter, and feature articles until June 13, 2006, for the weekly alternative newspaper New York Press.
He also wrote the long-running "Slackjaw" column for the Press. The first edition of "Slackjaw" appeared on October 25, 1987, in the Welcomat, a Philadelphia weekly (later renamed the Philadelphia Weekly), where he also reviewed restaurants and art exhibits.
Youth and early career
Knipfel was born on June 2, 1965, in Grand Forks, North Dakota on the American air base where his father was then stationed. Before he was a year old, the Knipfel family moved to Green Bay, Wisconsin where his father continued to work for the U.S. Air Force for many years and his mother worked in a variety of jobs. In his teens, he was diagnosed with a rare genetic disease called retinitis pigmentosa, which would progressively render him blind in later years. His first memoir, Slackjaw, chronicles the deterioration of his eyesight.
In his teens, while the family was living in Green Bay, he suffered from bouts of severe depression. Between the ages of 14 and 22, Knipfel tried to kill himself twelve times. After his final suicide attempt he was committed to a locked-door psychiatric ward in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he spent six months. He recounted his time there in his second memoir. In a Salon.com interview, he expressed bafflement at his multiple attempts at suicide: "I can't explain why I [attempted suicide] so many times, and how I did such a horrible job of it." In a 2003 interview with Leonard Lopate he said he'd found happiness and was too interested in life to attempt suicide again.
He briefly studied physics at the University of Chicago, and then transferred to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he majored in philosophy. When Knipfel and a friend nicknamed Grinch formed a campus political party called the Nihilist Workers Party they put together a flier promoting "telephone terrorism" that was published in the University of Wisconsin, Madison's student newspaper The Daily Cardinal without their permission. The prank earned a brief mention in Time magazine in 1987.
Knipfel writes that he planned, attempted, and committed many petty crimes in his youth. He wrote of a failed attempt to steal the corpse of the notorious American killer and graverobber Ed Gein from the graveyard at the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison. However, Gein was buried in Plainfield, Wisconsin, some 80 miles north of the hospital where he died.
In 1990, Knipfel moved to Brooklyn, New York with his then-wife Laura. He continued to write his weekly "Slackjaw" column for Philadelphia's Welcomat and tried to get the editor of the alternative weekly New York Press, John Strausbaugh, interested in publishing "Slackjaw", but the Press did not want to share the column with the Welcomat. Knipfel kept "Slackjaw" at the Welcomat out of loyalty to his editor Derek Davis, but he began occasionally contributing articles and music reviews to New York Press;
In 1993, after Davis was pushed out by Welcomat management, Knipfel moved Slackjaw to the New York Press. Shortly thereafter Knipfel became a receptionist at the paper's offices, and later a full-time columnist and staff writer.
Slackjaw: a memoir
At first Knipfel was dead set against writing a memoir, and was "content to publish in small publications" and quite "happy with the sheer disposability of newspaper writing", however, when Penguin Putnam editor David Groff offered him a book deal in 1997, after a decade of writing his column for New York Press, he accepted, rationalizing "that maybe there wasn't anything all that wrong with leaving something a little more solid behind". The first draft of Slackjaw was completed in two weeks, and at 500 pages long it was largely a collection of several dozen independent stories drawn from his columns. Although Knipfel could not discern a greater theme in the first draft, his editor pointed out that the memoir generally chronicled his journey towards blindness. With this theme in mind, Knipfel rewrote several drafts of Slackjaw, "looking at the stories in a different way and trying to find something that flows and has a rhythm", which finally produced a leaner memoir of which 60% of the content was fresh.