Peyton Sawyer's House on One Tree Hill— and John Jeremiah Sullivan's in life.

Last spring our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, came up to New York to give a little reading here on White Street. The surprising but true story he read, about living on the set of One Tree Hill—because it was his family’s house—just appeared in the new issue of GQ:

My wife was eight months pregnant, and we lived in a one-bedroom apartment, the converted ground floor of an antebellum house, on a noisy street downtown, with an eccentric upstairs neighbor, Keef, from Leland, who told me that I was a rich man—that’s how he put it, “Y’er a rich man, ain’t ye?”—who told us that he was going to shoot his daughter’s boyfriend with an ultra-accurate sniper rifle he owned, for filling his daughter full of drugs, “shoot him below the knee,” he said, “that way they cain’t get you with intent to kill.” Keef had been a low-level white supremacist and still bore a few unfortunate tattoos but told us he’d lost his racism when, on a cruise in the Bahamas, he’d saved a drowning black boy’s life, in the on-ship pool, and by this conversion experience “came to love some blacks.” He later fell off a two-story painting ladder and broke all his bones. A fascinating man, but not the sort I wanted my daughter having unlimited exposure to in her formative years. Not my angel. We entered nesting panic. We wanted big and solid. We wanted Greatest Generation, but their parents, even greater. We found it. It had a sleeping porch, and a shiplike attic where I in my dotage would pull objects from a trunk and tell their histories to little ones. We asked for the money, and in some office somebody’s boss came forward with the Stamp.

We commend the essay to your attention, the video version too.