It’s not often a writer has the utterly affirming pleasure of meeting an ideal reader. Even more rare is having that ideal reader interview you, and then do a discussion of your book on the radio with not one, but two more ideal readers. I had this great privilege a couple of weeks ago when The Half Brother was featured on Cyd Oppenheimer’s show Book Talk, on WNHH (New Haven).
The best link to the show is here. Continue reading
In a sign that my new book is now truly taking up the prime real estate in my head, psyche, and study, today I finally took down the stuff that accumulated up on the wall as I wrote The Half Brother: quotations, images, desperate notes to myself. They’re all reminders of the path this novel took, all well-worn life jackets that saved me over and over. Of course I’ll save them. But before they disappear into a file drawer, I thought I’d share a few. Continue reading
For mothers, fathers, caretakers. For anyone, really.
You must build a fence.
Make the space inside the fence as big as you can; but the more important thing is to have it be absolutely clear. It must be only pasture. It must be only free waving grasses and wildflowers and blankness. The space needs nothing from you. The metropolis of your life will be beyond the fence, built up to the very edge; but when you enter the pasture the city will disappear behind the fence, and you will hear only birds and the wind. Continue reading
I had the pleasure of talking with North Carolina personality D.G. Martin last week while I was in Chapel Hill. He’s a voracious reader (read my book in a day and a half after a Fedex snafu), former Green Beret and a Democratic politician–an actual renaissance man. He asked great questions about both The Half Brother and The Swimming Pool, and I hope he asks me back soon, even though I went to school at the wrong end of Tobacco Road. Here’s the link.
Many thanks to Deborah Kalb for having me on her fine blog. Read our interview here.
A sample:
Q: One of the book’s themes is the idea of a Southerner moving to New England, something you have done yourself. What are some of the major differences between the two parts of the country, and how do they affect your character Charlie?
A: There’s a deep guilt about leaving home, for some people, and yet it’s necessary. Whether it’s figurative or literal, it’s part of what Jung called individuation. So that tension is interesting.
And because Charlie’s a southerner, he’s a stranger in a strange land, which is where you need your protagonist to be. Although Charlie probably would feel that way wherever he lived.
Charlie moves north rather blindly—as I did. I came here when I was 22, because my old college roommate talked me into it, and if you had told me then I’d be here a quarter-century later I would have said you were nuts. But, of course, life is a mystery.
All those years ago, I think I was drawn to Boston at least in part because it’s a literary place. People are not afraid to be intellectually serious here.
But the main thing I miss about the south is that people there don’t take themselves seriously. Bostonians accomplish a lot, but they’re wound very, very tight. Southerners are good at seeing the absurd. They expect the absurd.
I wrote about one of my literary loves for The Believer, along with many other wonderful authors writing about many other wonderful authors…the entire collection spans the whole alphabet. Here I am at T, for William Trevor. Continue reading
Many thanks for this review from Books on the Table. That it comes from an indie bookseller (at the Lake Forest Bookstore) makes it especially nice. Go indie, go indie, go indie.
“Many novels are set at schools, but I’ve read few that capture the essence of what goes in on the classroom as well as The Half Brother.”
Read more here.
The lovely Caroline Leavitt was kind enough to have me on her blog recently. Caroline is amazing–a generous cheerleader for countless writers, a reviewer and blogger, and oh also she has written ten novels and they are bestsellers. I don’t know how she does it.
“Holly LeCraw talks about her devastating new novel, The Half Brother, teachers who mattered, what’s obsessing her now and more.”
Our conversation can be found here.