 I hate to blow my credibility right at the beginning, but I would have to confess to you, you look like a friendly group, that this novel, I know this much is true, actually began legally before it began creatively. Now to take you back to that year that She's Come and Done was published, 1992, I was in the middle of a six-city book tour. That was pretty exciting stuff for somebody who had been a high school teacher all his adult life. Suddenly I'm being treated like an author and squared around here and there, and my travels took me to La Jolla, California. It was a Sunday, it was a day off from the bookstore circuit, and my agent and I were in an outdoor cafe for Sunday brunch, and we were having a great old time. It was a sun-splashed morning, the Chardonnay was flowing, and suddenly my agent pulled out from her big straw bag a sheaf of legal paper and I said, oh, what's that? She said, well, this is a second book contract. She said, the publisher would like you to write number two, and they're willing to give you advance money to do it, so you'll be able to take a leave of absence from teaching and write full-time. What do you think of that? I said, I don't know, it seems a little backward to me, taking money for work that you haven't done yet, but my agent, being a good agent, explained to me that yes, indeed, this wasn't a very good idea. I think she had 15% somewhere in the back of her mind. Anyway, more Chardonnay, and by the end of that brunch it was okay, I'll sign. So I signed the devil's agreement, the book tour ended, the summer ended. I did indeed get my leave of absence. My wife, who was an elementary school teacher, went back to school day after labor day. My kids went off to school, and it was just the cats and me. Had the house all to myself, I was a full-time writer, at least part-time, or temporarily. So I pulled up my sleeves, I put on my brand new computer. I had a dozen celebratory roses from my editor on one side of me, a dozen celebratory roses from my agent on the other, and there was only one problem. I couldn't think of a damn thing to write. I didn't have any characters, I didn't have any conflict, nothing. Now I had made a promise to myself that I was going to stay in that writing office, keep business hours, and that got trickier and trickier to do as the week went on. And by the end of that first week, I had gone up to the attic and resurrected from one of the kids' toy chests, one of those paddle ball things, you know, with a little rubber ball. And I want to tell you, I got frighteningly good at paddle balling. I found myself, by the second week, jumping at any excuse. The doorbell would ring in those young, earnest, conservatively dressed young men just out of high school, those religious missionaries who come to your door, you know, they would stand there. And prior to this, my busy life and I would always say, oh no, no, no, I'm too busy, thank you anyway. But now it was, come in, come in. I'd be happy to listen to what you have to say. Now the very worst it got was, I think, somewhere around the one-month mark after lots and lots of wheel spinning and increasing insomnia and thoughts about maybe returning that advanced money and the worst it got was something called the paper clip game in which I sat in the middle of my office flicking paper clips, the object being to try to hit the window pane. Now this is how bad it got. There were teams, there was a playoff series, pretty pathetic. Now on the day that the muse finally was merciful to me, finally decided that I had been humbled enough, what I saw was the beginning of my character. I got a first glimpse of the guy who would then become Dominic Birdsy. Now one thing I forgot to tell you is that when I signed that agreement, the book company said that, well here's a deadline also. You have two years to write this novel and I finished six years later. So I was only four years over the deadline. But what I saw that first day when the novel started to come in earnest, best way I can describe it was maybe like 10, 15 seconds of a little movie playing in my head. My first novel, she's come undone, it started as a voice, a character, the character who became Dolores, actually started kind of talking and I was kind of writing down what she was saying. But this novel, Dominic, before he was Dominic, he was just a guy driving a pickup truck on a back road in the middle of the night. And I imagined he's the only poor soul out there on this lonely road and I imagined he's out there because he can't sleep. And so I began to play a guessing game with myself. Why can't he sleep? Who does he love? Who or what does he hate? And as I was seeing this guy on the pickup truck, I saw him begin to doze at the wheel. And his truck weaved back and forth over the median line and then he drove off an embankment. Now basically what happened is that reluctantly, somewhat trepidatiously, I went over the bank after him. And when I came back six years later, came stumbling back up the bank, I was holding this big bulky novel. And I had written a story about, amongst other things, the effect of schizophrenia on a family and Sicilian immigration, early 20th century immigration. I had written a book about forgiveness and also a book about oppression, how misusing power over other people defeats not only the victim but also the oppressor. And finally I had written a book about identical twins, a subject that came to really fascinate me but I had none of this in mind when I started. For me, writing is a process of discovery and I like it best when I'm in waters that seem almost over my head because then I have to stop and learn about the subject matter I've begun to write about. The best research that I did on the subject of schizophrenia was sitting with people, family members and psychiatric nurses and in a couple of cases people with schizophrenia themselves sitting in coffee houses and at booths and learning, educating myself so that hopefully I could write it credibly. Now Dominic is the, he's the speaker of this novel and he is the well-twin. When I started researching, I came up with a fact that really fascinated me and that fact was that in the cases where identical twins, where one twin develops schizophrenia because they start out as a single entity that splits in half and because they share biochemistry in almost all of the cases, if one twin becomes schizophrenic, the other one will as well. But the research shows that there is this funny little seven, eight percent of the cases where that does not happen, where one twin has the disease and the other twin is somehow spared the disease. And it became clearer and clearer to me that that was the story that I wanted to write. And Dominic's story, he is the well-twin, it's a story of conflictedness. He wants to be his brother's keeper and yet all his life he's played a game of one upsmanship on his more docile brother, a game of survival of the fittest. And he's also angry that his brother has been for him like an albatross and he's also afraid that the disease is waiting to claim him as well. So this is Dominic's voice. I'm going to read a couple of sections, one from their childhood. One Saturday morning, when my brother and I were 10, our family television set spontaneously combusted. Thomas and I had spent most of that morning lolling around in our pajamas, watching cartoons and ignoring our mother's orders to go upstairs, take our baths and put on our dungarees. We were supposed to help her outside with the window washing. Whenever Ray gave an order, my brother and I snapped to attention. But our stepfather was duck hunting that weekend with his friend Eddie Banus, obeying Ma was optional. She was outside looking in when it happened, standing in the geranium bed on a stool so she could reach the parlor windows. Her hair was in pin curls, her coat pockets were stuffed with paper towels, as she windexed and wiped the glass, her circular strokes gave the illusion that she was waving in at us. We better get out there and help, Thomas said. What if she tells Ray? She won't tell, I said. She never tells. And it was true. However angry we could make our mother, she would never have fed us to the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room, rose to his alarm clock at 3.30 each afternoon and built submarines at night. Third boat, third shift. At our house you tiptoed and whispered during the day and became free each evening at 9.30 when Eddie Banus, Ray's fellow third shifter, pulled into the driveway and honked. I would wait for the sound of that horn, hunger for it. With it came a loosening of limbs, a relaxation in the chest and hands, the ability to breathe deeply again. One night my brother and I celebrated the slamming of Eddie's truck door by jumping in the dark on our mattresses. Freedom from Ray turned our beds into trampolines. Hey, look, Thomas said, staring with puzzlement at the television. What? And then I saw it, too, a thin curl of smoke rising from the back of the set. The Howdy Doody show was on, I remember, Clarabelle the Clown chasing someone with a seltzer bottle. The picture and sound went dead. Flames whooshed up the parlor wall. I thought the Russians had done it. That Khrushchev had dropped the bomb at last. If the unthinkable ever happened, Ray had lectured us at the dinner table. The submarine base and electric boat were guaranteed targets. We'd feel the jolt nine miles up the road in three rivers, then fires would ignite everywhere, and then the worst of it, the meltdown, people's hands and legs and faces, would melt like cheese. Duck and cover, I yelled to my brother. Thomas and I fell to the floor in the protective position that the civil defense lady had made us practice at school. There was an explosion over by the television, a confusion of thick black smoke, the room rained glass. The noise and smoke brought Ma screaming back inside. Her shoes crunched glass as she ran toward us. She picked up Thomas in her arms and told me to climb onto her back. But we can't go outside. I shouted, fall out. It's not the bomb. She shouted back. It's the TV. Outside, Ma ordered Thomas and me to run across the street and tell the Anthony's to call the fire department. While Mr. Anthony made the call, Mrs. Anthony brushed glass bits off the tops of our crew cuts with her whisk broom. We spat soot flecked phlegm by the time we returned to the front sidewalk, Ma was missing. Where's your mother? Mr. Anthony shouted. She didn't go back in there, did she? Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Thomas began to cry, and then Mrs. Anthony and I were crying too. Hurry up! My brother shrieked to the distant sound of the fire siren. Through the parlor windows, I could see the flames shrivel our lace curtains. A minute or so later, Ma emerged from the burning house, sobbing, clutching something against her chest. One of her pockets was ablaze from the paper towels. Her coat was smoking. Mr. Anthony yanked off Ma's coat and stomped on it. Fire trucks rounded the corner, sirens blaring. Neighbors hurried out of their houses to cluster and stare. Ma stunk. The fire had sizzled her eyebrows and given her a sooty face. And when she reached out to pull Thomas and me to her body, several loose photographs spilled to the ground. And that's when I realized why she had gone back into the house to rescue her photo album from its keeping place in the bottom drawer of the china closet. It's all right now, she kept saying. It's all right. It's all right. And for Ma, it was all right. The house her father had built would be saved. Her twins were within arm's reach. Her picture album had been rescued. Just last week, I dreamt my mother, dead now from breast cancer since 1987, was standing at the picture window at Joyce and my condominium looking in at me and mouthing that long ago promise. It's all right. It's all right. It's all right. Whenever my mother underwent her chemotherapy and radiation treatments at Yale, New Haven, Ray drove her down there, kept her company, ate his meals in the cafeteria downstairs, and catnapped in the chair beside her bed. By early evening, he would get back on the road, driving north on I-95 in time for a shift at Electric Boat. When I suggested that maybe he was taking on too much, he shrugged and asked me, well, what the hell else was he supposed to do? Did he want to talk about it? What was there to talk about? Was there anything I could do for him? I should worry about my mother, not him. He could take care of himself. I tried to make it down to New Haven two or three times a week. I brought Thomas with me when I could, usually on Sundays. It was hard to gauge how well or poorly Thomas was handling, Ma was dying. As was usually the case with him, the pendulum swung irregularly. Sometimes he seemed resigned and accepting. It's God's will, he would sigh, echoing our mother herself. We have to be strong for each other. Sometimes he'd sob and pound his fists on my dashboard. And at other times, he was pumped up with hope. I know she's gonna beat this thing. He told me one afternoon over the phone, I'm praying every single day to St. Agatha. St. Who, I said, immediately sorry, I had asked. St. Agatha, he repeated. The patron saint invoked against fire and volcanoes in cancer. He rambled on and on about his stupid saint, a virgin whose jilted suitor had had her breasts severed, her body burned at the stake. Agatha had stopped the eruption of a volcano, had died a bride of Christ and blah, blah, blah, blah. One morning at six AM, Thomas woke me up with the theory that the special K that our mother ate for breakfast every day had been deliberately impregnated with carcinogens. The Kellogg cereal company was secretly owned by the Soviets, he said. They target the relatives of the people that they're really after. I'm on their hit list because I do God's bidding. Now that he was on to them, he said. He was considering exposing Kellogg's, rubbing it right in their corporate face. He would probably end up as Time Magazine's man of the year and have to go into hiding. Stalkers followed famous people. Look what had happened to poor John Lennon. Did I remember that song, Instant Karma? John had written that song specifically for him to encourage him to do good in the world after he had gone. Listen, my brother said. It's so obvious, it's pathetic. And he broke out into a combination of song and shouting. Instant Karma's gonna get you, gonna look you right in the face, you better recognize your brother and join the human race. One Sunday afternoon when Thomas and I drove down to visit Ma, her bed was empty. We found her in the solarium, illuminated by a column of sun coming through the skylight, sitting by herself among clusters of other people's visitors. By then the chemo had stained her skin and turned her hair to duck fluff, had given her once again the singed look that she had had that day she emerged from the burning parlor on Tollyhawk Avenue. But somehow, bald and shrunken in her quilted pink robe, she looked beautiful to me. Thomas sat slumped and uncommunicative through that whole visit. He had wanted me to stop at McDonald's on the way down and I had told him no, that maybe we could go there on the ride back. In the solarium, he pouted and stared trance-like at the TV and ignored Ma's questions and her efforts at conversation with him. He refused to take off his coat. He would not stop checking his watch and I was angry by the time we left, angrier still when during the drive home, he interrupted my speech about his selfishness to ask if we were still going to McDonald's. Hey, don't you get it, asshole? I shouted, don't you even come up for air when your mother's dying? He ended his seatbelt and climbed over the front seat, squatting on the back seat floor. He assumed a modified version of the old duck and cover. They pulled the car into the breakdown lane, threw her into neutral and told him to get back in the goddamn front, that I was sick and tired of his bullshit on top of everything else that I was trying to juggle. And when he refused to get up, I yanked him up and out of the car. He pulled free and bolted, running across the interstate without even looking. Horns wailed, cars swerved wildly. Don't ask me how he made it across. And by the time I got across the highway myself, Thomas had disappeared. I ran, panic stricken through woods and yards, imagining the ugly thump of impact Thomas ripped in half. His blood splattered all over the road. And I found him lying in the tall grass at the side of the highway, about a quarter of a mile up from where the car was. His eyes were closed, his mouth smiling up at the sun. When I helped him up, the grass was dented in the shape of his body. Like a visual aid at a crime scene. Like one of those angels he and I used to make in the new snow. Back in the car, I gripped the wheel to steady my shaking hands and tried not to hear and see those cars that had swerved out of his way. In Madison, I pulled into a McDonald's and got him a large fries, a quarter pounder with cheese, a strawberry shake. If he was not exactly happy for the rest of that trip, he was at least quiet and full. Thank you. Hi, Wally. I thought it was interesting. You started out with an exploding TV set and she's come undone. It opens with the arrival of a TV set. What's with the TV sets? Well, I am a member of the Baby Boomer Generation, wrecked by TV, I'm sure. I do remember distinctly the day that our first TV arrived. I was very excited about it. And I remember the vivid details of it still. And I always assume that I write pretty far away from my own life. But I'll tell you a funny story. About three or four years ago, my mother and four, there was a spring cleanup in their town, town where I used to live. And the deal was if you got everything out of the house that you wanted to throw away and put it on the sidewalk, the city workers came by and they took it all. And so my mother and father decided to clean out their attic and they needed help. So I drove down and as I was lugging things up and down, suddenly I saw that TV, this old Emerson TV, one of those old big boxy things. And I was startled because it was the exact television that I had described and she's come undone that arrived for Dolores and her family. So I sat there looking at that thing, scratching my head and saying, well, maybe you write a little closer to home than you realize when you're working with fiction. Do you really see things in color when you're writing or do you hear things or how are you perceiving? Both, when I was a kid, unlike a lot of the writers that I know and a lot of writers that I read about, I didn't love to read when I was a kid. I read, I wrote assignments for school but I didn't do a lot of it in my spare time. What I did was I drew, I drew constantly. My mother worked part-time at a printing company and my uncles were printers and so always coming into our home was all this great scrap paper. And I would sit there and I drew my own comic books and so forth. And I see now in retrospect that that was preparing me to be a fiction writer because I would draw, say, a scene of a bunch of people at the beach and next thing you know there'd be a tidal wave and I'd draw the results or I'd have a circus scene and everybody would be having a good time and then the lion's cage would be left open and chaos would ensue. So I think that was my early training and to this day I have a visual orientation into the fiction. Very often it's sort of movie-like for me and I do hear the character's voices and sometimes when the writing is going well I'm trying to keep up with what they're saying. It's coming quickly. Do you ever use drawing to help you when you're feeling stuck in your writing? Yeah, actually I do. She's come undone. I wrote mostly in longhand at the library. Here we are, not this library, but the University of Connecticut Library. And I think handwriting is somehow related to drawing. It's your sort of personal stamp on things. And my second novel was written more head to computer and in some ways it was a more bumpy ride for me. There was not a lot of that fluidity that I felt with the first novel. And a lot of times I do get stuck. I don't know where to go with the fiction and it keeps me up at night and so forth. And if I'm stuck during the day, one of the ways that I can dislodge whatever it is that's freezing me up is I'll run hard copy, I'll run whatever I'm working on, get a print out and then get away from the computer, get away from the room, go outside and grab a pen. And if I begin writing again, and lots of times the writing breaks out into drawing. And the word fluidity really, I really mean that to the point where often while I was writing I know this much is true and in a hard place with it, I would take those pages and I would go to some place where there was water. And the sound of moving water, the river or the water spill on which there's a water spill in this novel called The Falls or Indian's Leap that is actually based on a place in my hometown. And I would go there and visit there. And something about the sound of water and the fluidity of the pen together would get things rolling. Did you plot out your stories in advance or were you just discovering as you go along? How does this work for you? I'm always envious when I hear about writers who know the ending at the beginning of the journey or who outline before they write the first sentence but it just doesn't work that way for me. I have to write myself into the discovery and my work is character driven rather than plot driven. And I have to fall in love and worry over a character in the case of the first novel Dolores who horrified me much of the time. And she was sort of like a troubled daughter who just wouldn't obey me. And in the case with the twins too, I mean a lot of Dominic's behavior and his cruelty to other people was really disturbing to me. But I seem only to be attracted to imperfect people as characters but people who have the potential and the desire to become better people despite all of those imperfections. And I think probably that comes from my long history of teaching because when I started teaching high school back in 1972 and just gave up that position a couple of years ago. And in all those years when I look back at the kids that I loved the best, usually it was those troubled kids, those kids that came from less than perfect home environments and but were struggling to make life and make themselves better. How did you balance being a teacher and being a writer? How did you even do that? Not well. And I have three kids and a lot of demands on time. Some of you may be old enough to remember the Ed Sullivan show, Sunday night show and there was a, I guess he would be qualified as a juggler. There was an act that would come on every once in a while and this guy, he had rods, all these long skinny rods all over the stage and he would spin dinner plates on the rods and as the act went on, he'd spin more and more plates and you'd sit there and watch and one plate would start to wobble and get ready to crash to the floor and just when you thought, oh, there it goes, there it goes, he'd reach behind him and spin that one and then go on, make three more plates spin and they were all over the stage and that's sort of what my life is like because teaching is a full time job if you're doing it well and putting a lot of energy into it and so is writing, they require different things but I don't see one as more important or less important than the other. I wrote She's Come Undone while I was writing, while I was teaching full time and the way I did it was, I would set the alarm for 4.30, five o'clock in the morning and not all during the week but on weekends and I would drive up to the all night study room in the university library and I'd be the first idiot there, of course, with the gallon size coffee from the convenience store to wake myself up and there'd be maybe one or two kids asleep in their calculus notes or something and here I come with my notebooks and my fiction and I did it that way, I wrote very early and then I wrote during summer vacations and it was kind of wacky, I mean nobody promised me that I was gonna get anything published, I pretty much assumed that I would not get it published but this was when I was writing the first novel and I loved and worried over that character so much that I felt compelled to keep going, keep going, keep going because I wanted to find out what was gonna happen to her and there were no guarantees that she was gonna make it or not. And in both novels you've got really wonderful therapists, Dr. Patel. Thanks. He's terrific and the Dolores's therapist, Dr. Shaw. Dr. Shaw, yeah. Dr. Shaw, I mean at first when he started working with Dolores I'm like, oh my God, he's rebirthing, this is really bizarre but he really, he was really good, he really helped. He was earnest I think and it's funny because when I started writing Dr. Shaw I didn't know if he was gonna be a positive or negative influence on her either. I couldn't figure out Dr. Shaw and all that sort of way out there therapy that he was doing. But did you ever work with a therapist yourself to help you through hard times? I did a little short-term therapy, yeah. At a time, actually it was a time when I was having trouble sleeping and anxiety so but nothing major or nothing long-term but people ask me are the characters in the book like me and I would say if any of you have read, I know this much is true, Dr. Patel, his Indian psychologist, the Indian psychologist who starts working with Thomas Birdsey and then ends up working with Dominic. She's probably the closest thing to me just in terms of she and I are both sort of coaching the character to be a little bit more self-reflective and figure out why he's so angry and why, what the source of all that despair is. And she's also an advocate of using ancient myths to sort of cure yourself and I know that ancient myth is really important to me in terms of my fiction writing. I go back, I sort of see those old, old stories, those stories that have lasted through the ages, through the eons, that's like the wellspring for me. I once worked with a wonderful teacher named Gladys Swan and she put it to me. She said, well, she and I have boys like this and big, thick glasses that magnified her eyes and whenever she spoke it was like the oracle was speaking to you and she said, and you know, Wally, she was also the first person to tell me that when I started, she's coming down as a short story and I thought I was, that's what all that I'd written to that point and she was the first ones to suggest to me that it was a novel. She said, you know, I think with this one you got a few too many pots on the stove and I said, well, I said, what do you mean? She said, well, I think you're trying to tell yourself if you wanna write a novel and I said, I don't know how to write a novel. And that's when she said, go back and read the old stories because you're never gonna tell a completely original story. The best that you can do is put your original spin on a story that's lasted through the ages and the reason it's lasted through the ages is people need for it to be told. So that's when I began to discover the work of Joseph Campbell and Heinrich Zimmer and those guys. In fact, the closest thing that I had to any kind of a design with this novel was a story that I read in one of Heinrich Zimmer's books. It was an ancient Hindu myth that he called the king and the corpse and in that myth there's a sort of a proud but oblivious king and he has to be humbled in the story and it's a creepy, very non-western myth. There are corpses in there and the corpses are whispering riddles and the riddles are the keys by which the king can solve his dilemma and get out of the clutches of an evil sorcerer and by the end of that myth he saves himself by humbling himself by dressing in beggars rags and listening to the whispers of the dead. Now, when I wrote this, I used those whispers of the dead in the grandfather's story. Dominic and Thomas's grandfather, their Italian immigrant grandfather, dies the summer before they're born but he leaves behind a manuscript. It's meant to be, he's a horrible man, very cruel to other people, very much the oppressor and in his last days he decides he's gonna write down the story of his life as a guide for Italian youth. Just read my life and you'll know how to live. So he has a pompous reason for beginning but he sinned against people terribly in his life and what the grandfather's journal becomes is a sort of an extended confession and I had that, I had the grandfather's story very early on in the writing in the novel but I didn't know what it meant and in the actual story it ends up near the end and as I wrote the story I figured out what it meant that the grandfather's story is a story of failure. He could not be loved because he could not love and he could not stop exerting power over people and Dominic has some of those same sins and so the grandfather's story becomes sort of a cautionary tale for him. He can either repeat the sins of his grandfather or else he can evolve and so there's that king from the myth, humble yourself and do the hard work of self renovation and you can inherit a better world. I think that's one of the things that struck me about Dolores's work in the first book. She's Come Undone is that Dr. Shaw tells her that you can remake yourself and she does. She does but not in the ways that he prescribes and in that novel she abruptly leaves. She leaves to chase some guy up in Vermont before her therapist feels that it's appropriate for her to leave and of course she gets herself in more hot water. She does eventually evolve though but in some unpredicted ways. Now in the grandfather's diary and I know this much is true there's a monkey, where did this monkey come from? Because I see little monkeys kind of scratched throughout the book. Right, well again it's myth. When I started studying all these ancient stories one of the things that a lot of them had in common is that the hero on the journey or the heroine is guided along the path by animal helpmates. Animals sometimes that talked, sometimes that didn't but that guided them along the way and showed them the way at difficult times in difficult junctures. Now I used that same thing in She's Come Undone. Dolores's Totem Animal is the whale that sort of surfaces throughout the story in various ways and kind of helps her to figure out her life's journey. Now in I know this much is true Dominic's Animal is the monkey. Aggressive, curious, poking in around, pushing out, pushing the limits of things. His brother, his weaker and kinder, better half if you will, Thomas, his totem animal is the rabbit. So the mother in the story when the twins are little she calls them my little monkey and my little rabbit and that's what their personalities are like. One timid, one always climbing out of the playpan and getting into trouble. One of the things that Dr. Patel really teaches Dominic I think is to embody the positive aspects of his brother. But I had read somewhere that you actually started writing this book as an antidote maybe to She's Come Undone which is from a woman's perspective? Well I wouldn't go so far as to say antidote but it was funny after I wrote She's Come Undone before it was published I went down to New York and the president of the book company brought me into his office and he had read the novel and he said well this is a very brave thing that you have done are you sure you wanna go ahead with this and publish it? And I didn't know what he meant and what he was talking about is a man writing a novel from the point of view of the opposite gender. And I hadn't thought it was that big a deal but then when I found it when it was published and there was a big deal made out of it. It was challenging certainly and I hit lots of false notes as a guy writing from a woman's point of view but I think probably the three things that allowed me to sort of take on the assignment and then go with it and stay with it. First of all I grew up with sisters. I have no brothers myself but I have older sisters, bossy older sisters and we had a whole family of girl cousins that lived just down the street from us and they had wild and crazy imaginative play and stuff and sometimes they would let me play with them but only if I would be the victim. Like they'd be out on a jungle safari or something and I would be captured and boiled in oil, that kind of thing but usually I was the observer. It was all this wild and crazy play and I'd sit on the sidelines and watch them and then working with high school kids, half of whom are girls and inviting them to write down what they wanted to write about and so you're on the receiving end of lots and lots of young female voices and then also I work in a writers group and as a member of that group I would bring sections of She's Come Undone and the women in the group were never shy about speaking up when it didn't sound right and when it sounded false and so little by little I was able to sand the edges off of that. Anyway, the book gets published and every review mentions, oh this is, how did he write this from the opposite viewpoint or he did a good job and then that was always the first question at bookstores and libraries and so forth at Q&A time. Mr. Lam, now why did you choose to do that? And I don't know, I don't particularly buy into this thing that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. I mean that is, I think that's a kind of a shield that people hide behind so they can say, see, he just doesn't get it or she has a car she's that way, she's a woman and all that kind of stuff. I don't know, if men are from Mars and women are from Venus I guess I'm an intergalactic traveler. But with all those questions in my head to get back to your question and all that sort of focus on writing from the opposite gender, I started this novel with a question, well are men and women all that differently or all that different? And so I was very interested in examining traditional male behavior which has a lot to do with anger lots of times. And I think if I came to any conclusion at all it's that women sometimes when they have pain tend to implode, go inward and Dolores grows to kind of gargantuan size as a result of some of the trauma she has. Whereas men I think, and I guess it's probably more socialized than anything else, maybe also partly genetic. But I think that men, whereas women sometimes are implosive, men tend to be explosive. So you punch the guy in the bar stool next to you rather than eating three bags of Lay's potato chips. I have a question that may be irrelevant but at one point Thomas says that he started hearing things through the fillings in his teeth after he went to the dentist and that's how he was hearing his voice and I've heard that from a lot of schizophrenics. Have you got any notions about that when you were doing research on this? Was there any? No, but not specifically about fillings. But I tell you, when I started learning and talking to people about schizophrenia there was a doctor at the Norwich Connecticut State Hospital that I buttonholed and was very early into the writing. And he was the first person who said, I said, you know, I've got this character and he's acting this way and he's saying this and doing that, what would be a diagnosis for him? And he says, sounds like paranoid schizophrenia. He says, not true schizophrenia, that's those are the terms he was using. And I said, well, what's the difference? And he said, well, the true schizophrenic is so his world, his life, his voices, everything is so random that he sort of lives in a state of chaos when he's not medicated. But the paranoid schizophrenic will try to impose some kind of order over the chaos. And so the fantasies have to do with, you know, Martians or, you know, the Iraqis have, you know, put the fillings in the teeth and that kind of stuff. In other words, if I'm feeling this threatened there must be a reason for it. And when he said that, that struck me as such a sad and noble thing to try to do, you know, to take, you know, the effect of this terrible disease and try to make sense out of it. Even in this kind of, you know, this far out exaggerated way. Yeah, there was something that struck me as I was reading the book where Dr. Patel is talking to Dominic about grandiosity. Yeah. And that that was, that that's kind of a theme that Thomas is obviously grandiose, the whole world is out to get him and he's gonna be on the cover of Time Magazine. He can stop the Persian Gulf War from happening. Bike chopping off his hand. And Dominico Tempesta, he's the great man. Is that something that's very male, this grandiosity or is just something that's just a theme that's or very human or do you all do that? I don't know, I don't think I can really speak for all men on that, but certainly those characters, they had that in common. And again, it's that theme of humility. That, you know, that you have to stop believing that you are God and stop playing God. You know, one of the major themes in this novel and one of the things that Dominic has to learn how to do is to forgive and also to ask forgiveness. And in order to ask forgiveness of somebody, you've got to humble yourself. And if you withhold forgiveness from people, from someone, you are in a sense playing God and saying, no, I am not, you know, you do not deserve this and so I will not forgive you. And I don't think that's appropriate. Interesting. Why don't we just open this up? I'm sure you guys have a zillion questions. So who would like to ask something? And Daphne will bring you the microphone, okay? And then the next person raise your hands so that Daphne will see you. First of all, thank you for your fine work. Oh, thank you. I saw an interview with you. Couldn't have been more than a week ago. I think it was C-Span. It was book notes. Do you recall doing that? Yes, yeah. I caught the tail end and by the tail end, I mean, your last sentence, which I'm gonna ask you to elaborate on, your last sentence was, your advice was to write the story and let the story find its own audience. Do you recall saying it? Yeah. Thank you. Well, again, I have to reference Gladys Swan, my mentor from years back, because when I started writing, I was about 30 years old when I began trying to write fiction. And very shortly into that, I came to the end of what I knew about how to write fiction. And so I entered this MFA program and as a high school teacher and who had worked with some books that really succeeded with kids. I started working with Gladys and I said, well, my intent is to try to write a story that means as much to young people as to kill a mockingbird has meant to my students. That's one of the novels that students year after year really loved or came to love as they got into the story. And Gladys said, well, my dear, you need to chase out any thoughts of audience because she said, you need to write it true to yourself, true to your own vision, your own voice. And if you do that, the audience that's meant to hear it or read it will do so. But you need not to think about them, chase them out of the room and write it for yourself. Now, I have a vivid imagination, but I never could have imagined something like the Oprah Book Club and how a television show of all things could be the messenger to get me that offer to the audience. But that, oddly enough, that's what happened. Life is crazy sometimes. But I still follow that advice. I still remind myself of that all the time. When I'm sure when I sit down, right now my third novel is in this form. It's in a shopping bag on the backs of ATM slips and envelope flaps and stuff stuffed in that bag. And I have time this fall, I'm gonna start writing that third novel. And so I have to dump that thing out onto the rug and begin to make those connections between those bits and pieces. But I'm gonna need to remind myself because first book did well, second book did well. And that's kind of intimidating in some ways. And I'm sure I'm gonna be saying to myself, okay, can I write a third book that is meaningful to people? And I have to keep saying, uh-uh, you know, out the door, write it for yourself and whatever audience is meant to find it, we'll find it. Anybody else? Someone raise a hand who, oh, okay. Daphne's coming. One of the things that really impressed me about She's Come Undone was that you're the first author I've ever read, male or female, who's ever been able to write about movingly about eating disorder like compulsory overeating. And I just, she's, I mean, it's usually when the author's write about it, it's something I either, it's either unconvincing, they don't really allow themselves to get into it and write about it. Or I just wince, you know, at it. I can't bear to read it. And you wrote about it very graphically and yet very movingly. And I just wondered how you were able to do that. I think probably partly because I was a fairly fat kid while I was growing up. I was not the size, the proportion of Dolores, but you know, I was chubby enough to be kidded about it sometimes in elementary school and have that really hurt. I was sort of like the jolly fat kid. I was the entertainer in my classes growing up. But you know, I carry that, carry that with me and have that knowledge. And also, when I was, the year that I was student teaching, just learning, learning the ropes, I worked with a young woman who was obese and she sat in the back of the classroom. She came late every day to class and she had permission for some reason that I can't remember to leave early. And it was one of those, in this classroom there were those desks that sort of, one little desk top swings out from one of the sides and she was too fat to fit into one of those desks. So they had a special table for her set up in the back of the room. Now the students in that classroom were not mean to her. This was, these were seniors in high school but she clearly made them feel very uncomfortable. And so, because she came in late and left early and never said anything in class, she, if you didn't, as long as you didn't turn around you could pretend she didn't exist. You know, she could be invisible to you. And she was complicit in that. Now she had beautiful handwriting that I still remember. And because I was inexperienced and because I had gone into teaching to save kids' lives and to free them from the shackles of oppressive education and all that kind of stuff, I was all over her like a dog. You know, I was gonna save this kid. Speaking of grandiose, you know, I'm with her for 50 minutes, four times a week and I'm gonna turn her around and everything. And of course I didn't. She had her walls, her defenses built up and they stayed up. And so, my first teaching thing was a failure. And I worried about her from time to time. I wondered about her. And when I started, she's come undone. I had that voice, that sort of self-deprecating, funny, sarcastic, snotty voice of Dolores for about two, three weeks. And then all of a sudden one day I thought of that young woman whose name was Sharon sitting in the back of that classroom hadn't worked with her for nine, 10 years. And it was the marriage of that voice that I already had with that image of her sitting in the back of the room at her special desk, special table that sort of jet-propelled the novel in a way. I'm a pretty empathetic person. I can read people pretty well. And one of the things I can read is students' pain. So thank you, thank you very much. But some of that is based also on my own fatness. When you just talked about that student, it reminded me of the guidance counselor character when she was in high school. Oh, Mr. Pucci? Yeah, would you base him on yourself in that book? No. I base Mr. Pucci kind of on my Uncle Bruno, who was a dentist in town and closeted gay man, and was great with kids. He was, my mother was one of 11 children and there were three of her brothers and sisters who never married but were great to all of us kids, my cousins and my sisters and I, and would take us places and so forth. And he was always a really good guy to talk to, kind of meek. And so I was sort of thinking about him when I was writing Mr. Pucci. Do you know that you always wanted to write and write as being a writer and it took you a while to get around to it or did it just kind of come to you that this is what you really needed to do? I had no clue that I would ever, if I could, as my 25 year old self, if I could have looked into this future, I would have been absolutely flabbergasted. And for me, fiction and fatherhood came at the same time. That my oldest son was born on Memorial Day 1981, just turned 18. And my wife Chris and I were up all night in the delivery room, exhausted. I just couldn't believe this, you know, little miracle and so she was gonna try to get some rest and Jared went back into the nursery and I was gonna rush home, take a quick shower, do a couple of errands, make a couple of calls and then get back to the hospital so I could see him again. And it was that very morning that I got my first fictional impulse, the first fictional voice. It was in the shower, in that shower. And I heard a wise guy, high school student who'd just gotten a job as an ice cream truck driver, a Mr. Softy truck driver. And he was just kinda crabbing about his lousy summer job. And I didn't even know it was fiction. I didn't know what it was, but I remember jumping out of the shower, running naked down the hall and scrawling those two or three sentences on a piece of paper that I still have sort of written diagonally across a piece of loose leaf paper with all wrinkled and puckered up from shower dripping on it, shower water. And I forgot about it. My wife and the baby come home. I get pretty good at car seat straps and diaper pins and all that kind of thing. And then later that summer, you know, summer vacation for a teacher, I'm cleaning my desk and I see that piece of paper. And I go, oh, I know what that is. I remember when that happened. And I sat down and I got sucked in whole into the process and I haven't stopped since, but I didn't plan it. But for me, fiction writing and fatherhood have been intertwined because they started at the same time. So I'm curious, I'm an identical twin. And I'm curious, this was one of the few books I've read that captures I think a lot of the issues all twins have. And people ask me a lot what's it like to be a twin. And I came to the conclusion that I just said, you have to be a twin to know what it is. To know what it is. And I'm wondering how you are really able to capture I think just the issues of finding your identity and good twin, bad twin and aligning with different parents. And I was fascinated by that. Thank you. Are you an identical or a fraternal? Identical? Well, I have to say that all my life I've been jealous of twins. I think many of us who are not twins are. Because there, I used to have this fantasy that somewhere in the world was, I was a kid when I had this fantasy, was a little boy who looked exactly like me and one day we would be walking on the street and we would run into each other, right? And what I was looking for because I was the only boy with older sisters in a pretty geriatric neighborhood with not a lot of other kids to play with. What I was really fantasizing about was a soulmate. Somebody who would understand me and be my partner. And so I had that envy all my life. And I've always been interested in students of mine who were twins. And then when I realized, I had these guys as brothers before I realized they were twins. And when I started writing them as twins, then I needed to do my homework. And so I read a lot of pretty fascinating literature. And that's when I understood that in some ways it's really difficult, I think, to be a twin. In some ways it's wonderful and it is a really special arrangement. But there's difficulty there too. And part of that comes from that pull, that push and pull, I think. And also from that survival of the fittest thing. Now one of the books that I read about twins said that there are three basic twin relationships. In one, and I think speaking more of identicals than fraternals, they said in one typical type, the twins are each other's best friends. But they have a real strong sense of themselves as individuals. But they're good companions. And that's the easiest of the identical twin relationship. One of the other types, in one of the other types, the twins are basically competitors. They live their lives quarreling and fighting and competing with one another. Lots of times they end up not speaking and so forth. And then there's a third type of relationship where the identical twin feels like half of something as opposed to an individual whole. And those are the twins that quite often dress alike into adulthood and have a stronger relationship with their twin than they do with their spouse and that kind of thing. And they feel only like half of something. Now, when I wrote Dominic and Thomas, the part of their problem, I think, is that Dominic is always at war with Thomas because he's afraid Thomas is better loved by their mother. So he's always having to play that one upsmanship and Thomas feels like that half of something. He's always clinging to his brother. He's more passive, but passive aggressive in that he doesn't wanna let go of Dominic. And so they're in line some of the conflict of their relationship. If it rings true, you couldn't validate me in a better way. Thank you, thanks. Do we have one more question? Okay, one more question and then. You mentioned that she's come undone. You wrote in longhand that in this much I know is true, you wrote in a computer and then it was a little bit bumpier and I'm wondering why you continued writing on a computer if you found it harder and then if your third one you're gonna actually write in longhand again and kind of go back to the old way of doing it. I'll answer the second part first. I think probably, and who knows how the third one is gonna come out, but I think probably what I'll try to do is incorporate both methods rather than one way or the other. And I can't really answer the first part of your question. It just kept coming that way. I just kept going back to that computer. I think probably part of it is because I don't like to write. I again, I find a character that I need to find out about. But I'm a great one for finding all manner of ways to avoid getting to the apartment where I write. I used to write in the home and in the wake of all the Oprah stuff, the phone wouldn't stop ringing and it became a great excuse for me to get up from the desk and stuff. So in order to solve that problem, finish the second book. I had to, I rented a little apartment, one town over from the town where we live and I drive there and it's a second floor apartment. I have a landlady downstairs, Bunny. And there's no phone there, which is a real asset. And there's no furniture with the exception of a table where the computer is. The room has to be boring and blank so that if anything interesting is gonna go on, it's gonna be on the screen or on the page. I think probably one of the reasons why I use computer is avoidance. If you sit there and forever play with the sentence and flip the clauses around and tamper with this adjective, no change it three or four times, then you don't have to write the second sentence. You can keep revising. And the computer, I work with students and the computer is a godsend as far as encouraging students to revise and they really need to revise as do I. But it's these little games that writers can play with one another or with themselves and that's one of the games that I play. If I'm on the computer, I can keep fixing that paragraph because I'm not sure where the next paragraph is gonna take me. Wally's gonna be available to sign books in the back and if you'd like to buy a book, Stacey's gets, will give the library 10%. So I want to thank you Wally Lam for being here. Thank you so much. What a nice warm audience you've been to chat with. Thanks.