1961 DeMatha Graduate Has 24th Book Published

Dr. Michael Mewshaw, whose 24th book, Not Heaven But Paradise, was recently published, had his life all mapped out as a teenager. After starring on one of Morgan Wootten’s first basketball teams, the 1961 DeMatha graduate would go on to play in college and become an NBA All-Star.

Mewshaw thought this would be the best way to … achieve fortune and fame? No, he had a more basic desire.

“I wanted to use all of these successes to get a date,” Mewshaw said by phone last week from Key West, Fla. “A lot of guys were wise enough to just cut to the chase and ask a girl to go on a date. But I felt I had to achieve all these other goals first.”

Instead of being a star on Wootten’s 1960-61 club, Mewshaw was a benchwarmer. He never played in college or the NBA, but he did contribute to the Stags' first Catholic League championship team. The squad finished 27-1 and was ranked No. 1 in the Washington area.

“When I was a student at DeMatha, I was full of longing – to get a driver’s license, to pass algebra I – but my main longing was to make the team,” he said. “I became an active rooter on the bench, but I was pleased. It wasn’t easy to make the team, even then.”

Mewshaw was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in East Riverdale, Md., an area he described to The Washington Post in 1991 as America's first "suburban slum." He wrote for DeMatha’s student newspaper and yearbook and said he knew he wanted to be a writer from an early age.

“I felt that I could combine writing with my NBA career,” he said. “The way I was dreaming about becoming a professional basketball player, I was also dreaming about becoming a writer. The odds of me becoming a [prolific author] were probably the same as me becoming a star in the NBA.”

Mewshaw's 24 books are evenly divided between fiction and non-fiction. Two from the latter that drew national acclaim (and controversy) are Short Circuit: Borg, McEnroe and Connors – The Era of Bribes, Match-fixing and Drugs; and Ladies of the Court: The Struggle to Confront the #MeToo Moment in Women’s Tennis.

Not Heaven But Paradise is about ex-pat American living in Granada, Spain who “finds himself caught in a world of attractions, betrayals and terrorist violence that threaten to invade his already precarious life.”

Diane Mehta of the National Catholic Reporter calls it a “page-turner, efficient and fun” that “relies on a sequence of perfectly normal scenes that promise to be entertaining, until the whole thing explodes and we are no longer laughing.”

Mewshaw said the publication took him about three years to write. At age 82, he knows that he’s much closer to the end of his writing career than the one that began when his first novel hit bookstores in 1970.

Book No. 25, entitled, Lost Children of Paradise, is in the works. “I’m pleased with my writing and pleased that I’m still able to write and get published,” said Mewshaw, who has a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Virginia and has taught at U.Va., UMass and the University of Texas.

Mewshaw’s dating life eventually worked out very well. He and his wife, Linda Kirby, have been married 58 years and have two sons, one in Maine and one in New York. The couple will be leaving Key West at the end of April to visit their boys and then spend the summer in Paris, London and Rome.

“The trials and tribulations of living anyplace are the same,” Mewshaw said. “It sounds much more romantic than it is. My wife speaks [several] languages and is the one who makes [living abroad] possible because she’s able to negotiate her way in all these foreign places.

“The choice of a mate in life has a lot to do with a man’s fate in life. I’ve been very blessed.”

For more on Mewshaw and to purchase Not Heaven But Paradise, see https://www.michaelmewshaw.com/home.

Chris McManes is DeMatha Catholic High School's communications manager.