>Thom Jones

THE JANITOR WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD

"BEFORE I CAME DOWN WITH TEMPOral lobe epilepsy [in 1965], I was a blue-collar guy destined for a blue-collar life," says Thom Jones, 48. A native of Aurora, Ill. ("where if you made eye contact with anybody, you'd get into a fistfight"), Jones became an amateur boxer in the Marines "until I got a head injury and started losing sense of time. I had these fits called fugues"—the onset of the epilepsy. "When they happen, you actually forget who you are, but you feel something holy and wondrous is at hand. Once it passes, you get frightened."

Discharged at the end of his hitch (he never left Camp Pendleton), Jones began reading philosophy and classical literature as a way of "extinguishing the psychic pain and black depressions" of his continuing epilepsy. Finally, Jones turned to writing and in 1970 was accepted by the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop. There the author met his future wife: Sally Williams, now 46, was studying French. The two subsequently moved to Lacey, Wash., where they live with their 10-year-old daughter, Jennifer.

"After Iowa, for many years I turned my back on life. I worked as a janitor until I realized that writing was my Only way out," Jones says. His efforts finally paid off in 1990 when the title story of The Pugilist at Rest was discovered in a slush pile at The New Yorker. The magazine bought several more stories, as did Harper's and Esquire. "I don't find the new celebrity particularly nice; Jones says. "It's just another form of stress. Some people write and some people fix cars. There's no moral high ground."