HOUGHTON By the time the freshmen seated in the Rozsa Center Tuesday afternoon graduate, Drew Magary wants them to pick up what he calls the most important attribute for happiness and success: self-awareness.

“I hope for your sake you guys come out of here smart enough to see inside those experiences, recognize your part in your failures and adjust accordingly,” he said. “You should become self-aware while you’re here. Not self involved – we’re all plenty self-involved. I’m talking the ability to cut through your own (deception), understand why you’re doing what you’re doing even when you’re doing the wrong thing.”

Magary, author of the novel “The Postmortal,” spoke at Michigan Technological University Tuesday as part of the 13th annual Reading as Inquiry series. Students and other community members read the book over the summer and then discuss it in classroom sessions during orientation week.

The book takes place in the near future, when a cure for aging has been discovered. The book follows the protagonist, estate lawyer John Farrell, over the course of a century, as the world descends into chaos.

Magary’s talk spent less time on the novel than of his own self-deception regarding his own drinking problem. Beginning in his teen years, the problem grew until his arrest for driving under the influence in his late 20s.

He talked about the experience, from booking to his alcohol education classes. The most painful part, he said, was the confrontation with his wife, and the 24-hour freezeout that followed.

“I wasn’t her husband that day, I was just this thing she had to deal with,” he said. …You could have strapped me to a table and sawed through my bones, and it wouldn’t have been as painful.”

In the legally required alcohol support groups that followed, Magary said, he first followed the stnadard alcoholic train of thought. He wasn’t like the other degenerates there. He was an anomaly.

“I just didn’t want to admit, I wasn’t there by accident,” he said. “I was just as stupid and irresponsible as the rest of them.”

At their age, Magary said, he was always reluctant to pin the blame on himself. John Farrell had the same problem. With no physical changes, he thought he never had to change emotionally.

Magary told students not to follow the same route.

“The deeper you know yourself, the deeper you can understand your own thoughts, ideas and actions,” he said. “Because ideas are going to be all that matter when you get out of here. Your value to the university will be judged solely on your ability to think of good ideas and then execute them. People with no self-awareness think they have the greatest ideas in the world.”

Magary said he and Farrell share some traits, but he based the character more on a friend of his who hadn’t settled down in his late 30s. His Alcoholics Anonymous classes didn’t shape the story as much as it provided the impetus for making a creative statement.

“It didn’t affect the story as much as my need to redeem myself by making something of some value,” he said.

Other fan questions included what he wanted to work on as a writer (characterization) and the progression of the book’s style, which began in the form of blog posts before transitioning into a more standard narrative. One just had the plaintive cry, “Why do you kill everyone John loves?”

“It needs to have some propulsion to it, so you’re going to have bad things happen to the character,” he said.

While geared at incoming freshmen, the summer reading program has expanded in both directions. About 100 high school students read the book as part of their AP English class. There are also community reading groups over the summer sponsored by the Copper Country Reading Council.