A Conversation With ... Ryan O'Reilly

Title: Managing Director

Education: English literature degree with a journalism minor, Westminster College, Fulton

Literary pursuits: O’Reilly, 29, wrote his book, ‘Snapshot’ after walking away from his life in Springfield and traveling around the United States on his motorcycle with only a backpack.

Let’s talk about “Snapshot,” your work of fiction that follows a nameless narrator on a cross-country journey to figure out life. The book jacket says the story is loosely based on your experiences. How much is fiction?

Quite a lot of it, actually, is fiction. In my experience, the line between fiction and autobiography is usually a really thin one. Hemingway said you always write about what you know, so with fiction, you take bits and pieces of things that actually happened. The trip itself was something that I took, and a few of the situations and the smaller characters in the book are people I met along the way. The middle part of the book, which takes place in State Bridge, Colorado, was all true. (The trip) was what my parents (Charlie and Mary Beth O’Reilly) called my quarter-life crisis.

Before you embarked on your real-life journey, what was your job?

I worked in the customer service department at O’Reilly Automotive Inc. for about three years, and then sort of flipped out. I had a job, and kind of like in the book, I did have a pretty serious relationship and all of these things that were kind of pointing to retirement off in the not-so-distant future. I just thought, “This is happening too fast. I’m not ready for this.”

In the book, the narrator walked away from his job with no notice, just a voice mail. Is that what you did?

No, there was a little more of a gap between when I actually left the company and left on my trip. It wasn’t quite that sudden. You always have to think practically, even when you don’t want to, and that’s sort of what I mean about the thin line between fiction and reality. I really wanted to just leave, but of course, that never looks good on your résumé. In books, you can make things like that happen without the real-world repercussions.

But ultimately, you did walk away from your life, and your work, in Springfield. Can you talk more specifically about what you were feeling when you did?

(Older family members) never directly put the pressure on us (to work in the family business). Of course, when you grow up with a family business like that, you have a romantic notion as a kid that it will stay a family-run company, that it’s the thing that defines us as a company. We all helped build it and were a part of it. Reality is somewhat different now, especially since O’Reilly is so big, and it’s a public company, and it’s obviously not a family-run company. That was one of the things I really had to wrangle with – not so much that I was expected to work there, but that this thing that I had always been a part of, wrestling with the idea that I’m not going to be a part of it, which was pretty difficult, given the identity that I’d been carrying since childhood. I had to let go of it and go off on my own. (What) I finally came up with as far as the company is concerned was that I’m finding it difficult to justify why I shouldn’t be a part of it. My grandfather put a really deep spin on a particular way to do business, making sure that you take care of the people who work for you. I thought, “How is that going to carry on … without an O’Reilly working at the company?” That may be part of why I felt I had to be a part of it, to carry on my parents’ legacy and my grandfather’s legacy. But you know what, as big as it’s become … O’Reilly is still, at its core, the same company my grandfather started, so it will always be a family business in that respect. I convinced myself that everything in the company was still what my grandfather had always hoped it would be, and I could go off and do my own thing.

Tell us about your foray into the music business?

I moved to Texas after my trip, and (lived) there for about four years. I have two business partners in 415 Entertainment in Texas, so now, I go back and forth. We have a few bands that we manage, and we also do concert promotion and things like that.

Are you writing another book?

I am working on two, actually. That’s kind of an advantage of living in both Missouri and Texas. I have my literary life here in Springfield … and my business in Texas. I’m working on another novel, and also on a travelogue about a trip that I took over the summer. I paddled the Missouri River all the way from its source in Montana ... to St. Louis, so I’m writing an explorer’s guide to the Missouri River. That was a pretty wild trip.

Will those books be published by Black Oak Press, which published “Snapshot”?

No. I’m in the process of starting my own publishing company, and I’d like to release a few titles a year, including my own, and do it mostly through independent bookstores, online and audiobooks. I just built a house out in Jamesville, Missouri, and my company is going to be the Jamesville Press. The first thing I’m doing is recording an audiobook version of “Snapshot.” One of the interviewers I talked to out in California passed the book to a guy who’s a member of the Screenwriters Guild, and he said the book would be a fantastic screenplay. So then I’m going to delve into screenwriting, too, and send out a screen-written version. After those two things and finishing my other two books, I’ll start looking for manuscript submissions from other writers.

You’ve mentioned your parents. Tell us about the rest of the family.

My family has been everything in the world to me. I’m the youngest in my (immediate) family. My closest brother, Tim O’Reilly, is 10 years older than me, and then Pat’s the oldest. If you’ve met my mother, she’s a pretty strong-willed individual, and I think that raising all boys might have helped to contribute to that. One thing about the journey with the book, too, is that it’s made me even closer to my extended family.

What advice do you have for unhappy professionals?

I had a conversation with a friend not long ago, and she said, “People can’t just take off like that after school. You have to get a job, otherwise, there’s going to be a hole on your résumé.” That’s the absolute wrong way to look at it. If I were an employer, and I saw that someone took six months to a year off after college, I’d think, “This person’s here because they want to be, not just because it’s the next step and they’re here because they have to be.” My journey isn’t the only way to do it. There are limitless ways to do it, whether it’s just going out and working in a coffee shop for a year or something like that or traveling Europe or whatever. Just do something, and then … periodically throughout your life, repeat that process. Take time off and ignore the middle-American normality that we all seem to be attached to pretty consistently. If you don’t, then all of a sudden a month will be come a year, then a year will become a decade, and then a decade will become four or five. Adventure isn’t limited to drastic change. It can be as simple as doing something out of the ordinary during your vacation.

Interview by Features Editor Maria Hoover. You can e-mail her with suggestions for future installments of this feature at mhoover@sbj.net.[[In-content Ad]]