 Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for coming so much. I'm Betsy Peckler and a Dean of University Libraries here at Roger Williams. And I'd like to welcome you all to our first talking in the library for the fall semester. All of the talking in the library events are generously supported by an endowment that was made to the library. I think it was over 10 years ago by an alumna named Mary Teft White. She was married to John Hazen White, who you may recall took out the giant ads in the Providence Journal years ago. And she also donated for this space that we're sitting in here today. But annually, we collaborate with our Rogers Free Library, the Bristol Public Library partners, and who generously helped to support one lecture each year. And this one tonight is one such lecture that was able to be supported by the Jane Baudel Endowment. So thank you all. I see a lot of our Bristol discussion group partners here. So we're happy about that. And we're hoping that, or I'm sorry, I just said that. We are so pleased to welcome the novelist and the artistic director of the Boston Literary Center, Grub Street, Christopher Castellani, to speak this evening. And Professor Adam Braver, our library program director, is going to introduce Chris in just a moment. I'd like to briefly mention our next two talking in the library events this semester. On November 6, we will welcome Johar Ilham, daughter of Uyghur scholar Ilham Toti, who was dedicated to bridging the gap between the Uyghur people and the Chinese Han until his arrest and imprisonment in 2013 en route to the US to complete a fellowship at Indiana University. And Johar was stuck in this country, not able to return to her own, and worked that time putting herself through college and as an advocate for the Uyghur people who currently are being held in re-education camps in China. On November 20, we will welcome Robert Boyers, who some of you may have heard of, a public intellectual and editor of the quarterly Salma Gundy, and Professor of English at Skidmore College for 50 years. He's taught there. He will speak about his most recent book, The Tyranny of Virtue, Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies. So please join us for those two events. And now I'd like to ask Adam Braver to introduce her speaker. All right, yeah, let go, Betsy's. Thank you for all being here. The most important pressing issue for anybody under the age of 21 is Professor Delaney. I have his sign-up sheet for you. And he asked me to have you sign it after the talk. I think it is fair to say that most writers of serious fiction are concerned with the before and the after. The high-impact, inciting event most often is just that, an inciting event, not the focus of the novel. Most serious writing finds itself interested in the effects of an event. We can call that the after. And the character and how the characters or situation might have been ripe for change. We'll call that the before. It takes a nervy writer to navigate both of these worlds in separate but intertwining storylines, ones in which the effects of the after are understood through the circumstances of the before, while at the same time, seeing how the decisions of the before risk creating long-term and lingering effects well into the after. Bring in a little dramatic irony. And as a reader, you may find yourself rooting against what already has happened, while also rooting for what you know will never happen. As I said, that takes a nervy writer, a writer such as Chris Castellani. It also takes great confidence, something I think we always see in Chris's books. Perhaps his own writing process includes degrees of exploration and discovery. But on the finished page, we see a writer who is in complete control of his characters, narrative, and sentences. Never would we ever pull back out of the world of the book questioning the direction, the reasoning, or the logic of the narrative. In other words, we always trust that we are in the hands of a sound practitioner. Well, of course, I will leave the discussion of Chris's new novel, Leading Men to Chris. It is important to mention that equally laudable is Chris's dedication to the world of literature. The world of serious writing, especially in this moment of time, is one that needs to be nurtured, encouraged, valued, and championed. Through his work at Grub Street, his support of both younger and fellow writers, and the commitment to maintaining a writing community is something that not only should be acknowledged, but should be modeled by anyone who believes in the importance of the fine arts in our society and culture. I'm going to pause because I forgot to mention that in the back, books will be for sale after the reading. And they're $21.75 with tax. I'm certain Chris would be willing to sign them. As I said, I will leave the rest of the discussion about Chris's work and his fine new novel, Leading Men, to him. So in that case, please welcome from Boston, all the way down the 24 corridor, Christopher Castellani. Thank you so much, Adam and Betsy, and to everyone, the library, Roger Williams for having me here. Thanks to all of you for being here. I know some of you are here under obligation, perhaps. But I hope that the obligation will actually be interesting to you. And I also know there are people here who've already read the novel. So maybe some of this will be a little bit repetitive. I don't know, or not repetitive. But you already know what I'm going to tell you about. But I hope it will still be interesting for you as well. As Adam said, I love working with writers. I love the writing community in Boston, or Greater Boston, I should say, that I've been involved with for over 20 years. And I love doing events like this for a chance to connect with people around or over writing. So what I'm going to do today is for about 10 or 15 minutes, I will sort of set up this new novel for you. It's a novel, it's technically alt-historical fiction, which means it's about real, it's a novel, so it's fiction. But it includes characters who are really lived, who are real people. And so the very first question I always get about this book is, how much did you make up, and how much is real? And the other question I get, that most writers get, is, where did this idea come from? So I try to head that off at the pass by starting with a presentation for lack of a better word that answers those questions. And since the characters and the settings tend to be on the glamorous and beautiful side in this book, I thought I could not show you some of them. So that's why I have the visuals tonight. So I will do that for about 10 or 15 minutes. And then I'll read a bit from the book, and then I'm happy to take any questions that you may have. So let's see. Get this started. Ooh. Get that started. OK. So this part is true. And I think, hope you can see in the big screen. But if not, you have the smaller screens there. And you can all hear me OK? Great. Awesome. So this part is, oh, you can really hear me now. I will take this off. OK. So this part is true. In July of 1953, Truman Capote, there on your left, invited his frenemy, Tennessee Williams, and Tennessee's partner, Frank Merlot, who are there on the right. Tennessee laying down and Frank sort of sitting up. Truman invited Tennessee and his partner, Frank Merlot, to visit him in Portofino. Tennessee and Frank were four years into their long relationship, living in Rome and having a rough summer. Frank was restless and aimless and had taken a lover. Tennessee was struggling to write his next great play after a streetcar named Desire. That same month of Capote's invitation, again, July of 1953, Williams wrote in his journal, Frank's behavior toward me has become insufferable. He has sunk into such a pit of habit and inertia and basic contempt for his position in life, which I think he hates me for. Oscar Wilde uttered a true thing when he said each man kills the thing he loves. The killing is not voluntary, but we sure in hell do it and burn for it. I have given up faith and happy solutions to problems between two people, but I shall try to think of something just the same. And I love this photo because it sort of captures for me. This is from not long after, but it sort of captures for me the tension. But when I read this passage in Williams' notebooks, I noticed he kept constant notebooks and recorded everything. He didn't have a photo of himself in the notebooks, but I sort of superimposed his photo onto that. But I noticed that Williams, who kept constant journals and notebooks, makes no entries at all soon after that passage I just read, in particular between July 28th and August 7th, 1953. And I thought, hmm, so what if they got into Tennessee's Jaguar, and they drove up the coast from Rome to Portofino to go to Truman Capote's party? What and whom might they find there? This is true as well. That same month, July of 1953, a few hours away in Florence, expat author John Horn Burns was drinking himself to death. If you've never heard of John Horn Burns, you're not alone. When he published his first novel, The Gallery, in 1949, he was heralded as one of the first great post-war American novelists. But then his next two novels completely flopped. And he was so humiliated and furious that he abandoned the US altogether. Miserable but finally free, he took up with a handsome Italian doctor named Sandro. And I wondered, what if they, too, had received and accepted an invitation from Truman Capote to that party in late July, August 1st, 1953. Whether or not they did, the fact is that John Horn Burns died two weeks later, on August 11, 1953, just a few hours away, quite mysteriously. And speculation remains that Sandro, the handsome Italian doctor, had a hand in it. Here's another true thing, another letter from that same month, this time from Truman Capote to David O. Selznick. Capote writes, there are some simply extraordinary people in Portofino. There is an Australian girl who ran away with her stepfather and a Swedish mother and daughter who share a fisherman between them. But these are very ordinary circumstances. Altogether, the place is fraught with peril. So I wondered, what sort of peril could occur in this beautiful playground of the rich and famous? And what if that unnamed Swedish mother and daughter were somehow involved in it? Actually, what if that daughter, and this is the part where I started making stuff up, what if that daughter was a young aspiring actress named Anya? And Tennessee and Frank discover her. And she goes on to become one of the most celebrated actresses of her time, the muse of a great director, someone like, say, Liv Ullman or Ingrid Bergman. And what if, late in life, after she had outlived all the men who had shaped her career, Anya became a director herself? And what if for nearly four decades she'd held on to a play that Tennessee Williams wrote just for her in the months before he died? So Frank, Williams' partner and Anya, their friendship is forged that weekend in Portofino. That's actually Greta Garbo on the right. But she's also sort of an inspiration for this character. So Frank and Anya's friendship is forged that weekend in Portofino after some of that peril that Capote wrote about. These are the two narrators of this novel in alternating chapters. Frank is narrating from Manhattan in 1963. He's 40 years old and dying of lung cancer, waiting for Tennessee to visit him one last time. And that's actually how I met, sort of met on the page, Frank, because I was reading a memoir and memoir of Tennessee Williams written by another friend. And he described how all their friends were in the hospital room in 1963 in New York with Frank while he was dying and everyone had come to see him except for Tennessee. They had been together for 15 years and Williams wasn't coming to see him. They were estranged by the end of their relationship but everyone was upset to say the least that Williams wasn't coming to see him. And that really stuck with me. So he's narrating half the novel and the other half Anya is narrating from the present day. She's in her late 70s and reclusive, she's the after that Adam spoke about I guess. She's in her late 70s and reclusive and living in a US city that she despises so ferociously that she can't even bear to name it. But I can tell you that it's Boston. So in case you're wondering. So, and I'm gonna be completely obnoxious and name drop and tell you that a few years ago I was at a party with Liv Ollman, which I could prove because here we are. And it was she really who sparked the idea for this character. But everything else about Anya is invented. And when I told Liv that I was drafting a novel about Tennessee Williams, she told me about the one encounter that she had with him, which is not in the book. I didn't put it in the book, but I'll tell you anyway. It's sort of like a DVD extra. And she told me that, so it was the 70s and she was in Paris and she was a younger actress at the time. She was a huge fan of Tennessee Williams and she spotted him across the lobby of the hotel room. Sorry, of the hotel lobby. Yeah, the lobby of the hotel. And she was so nervous and excited, but she was too shy to go up to him and tell him how much she admired his work. So he had his dog with him because Williams always had a bulldog. And so he had his bulldog with him. And she noticed that the bulldog had walked away from him. So she hastily scrawled a note, like a sort of fan letter, like on some station area or something that she found. And she went over to the dog and she tucked the note, the fan letter under his collar. And then she stood back and she waited for Williams to notice and the dog came back to him. He picked up the note, read it. He sort of spotted her across the room. He came sort of marching over to her and she was all excited. And he came up to her and he thrust out the paper and he said, my dog is not your fucking mailman. And then he walked away. And so that was her one encounter with the great playwright. And so she told me that over croissants at a brunch. Anyway, so off and on for the past 20 years, I've held these people close to me as I've been writing this book, the real people and the invented ones. This is Anna Magnani, the great Italian actress on the left, Paul Bowles, the great American writer and Lucchino Visconti, the great Italian director. These are all characters in the book as well. Sometimes I've forgotten who I've made up and whose books and journals and letters and biographies I've read and reread. I've interviewed a man who calls himself the last living lover of Tennessee Williams. Gave me some interesting information. I visited Portofino and Rome and Livorno to see the places they lived and died. And as I crafted a story between the cracks of what was known about these people, I aspired to create characters like the Virginia wolf of Michael Cunningham's The Hours, the Henry James of Comptoy Beans, The Master and Ben, the Vietnamese cook of Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein in Monique Trong's The Book of Salt. So those three novels were the kind of inspiration for this book. And I was particularly struck in Comptoy Beans' book, The Master, about Henry James. Each chapter is kind of like a retelling of a Henry James story, kind of a twisted version of it or a take on it. And I was really inspired by that. And so this novel is actually a kind of like a funhouse mirror version or a twisted warped version of a play called Suddenly Last Summer by Tennessee Williams. And it's my favorite of his plays, not because it's his best, but because it's one of sort of weirdest play and most troubling play of his major plays. And so I wanted to just play the trailer of Suddenly Last Summer, the film version of this play that was the... The Last Summer Last Summer needed you while you were still useful. I mean, yo, able to attract to his family again, that man's eyes. He left her home because she got a stolen, lost her attractiveness. What does attractiveness have to do with Cassandra Lovett? Because we were both decoyed. It's just slightly melodramatic. I've always been majorly attracted to melodrama and this just hit the sweet spot for me, this play and this film. This generation's greatest author and poet, writer of a streetcar named Desire and cabal hocked in root, unashamedly writes of a woman's strong once and that man's strange needs. Those of you who've read the novel will know, will recognize this. Great stars combine their talents to recreate Suddenly Last Summer Tennessee Williams' magnificent draw. Traumatic experiences of course. It's a superman. It's a trans paradise. He just grabbed me by the hand and dragged me away. And then it goes on and on, so we won't let that happen. It's a bit self-indulging for me to show that clip, but I just can't help it. Because it gives you a real sense of the sort of melodrama that I was working with and also of the issues that the play and the novel get to. So I told the anecdote about Williams in the lobby of the hotel and I showed that clip to illustrate in part the mercurial nature of Tennessee Williams and to say that it's living with him in the shadow of his genius as his partner and his great love that first and most strongly inspired me to write this novel. Because the person at the sort of beating heart of the novel isn't Anya or Tennessee Williams or John Hornburns or Truman Capote. It's Frank Merlot, a working class, Italian-American guy like me, a truck driver, a Jersey boy, a veteran, an aspiring dancer, an actor, a dreamer, a romantic, the life of the party. He died too young, heartbroken, in pain, his chest burned black from cobalt treatments and I wanted to bring him back to life and to give him some joy. The truth is that Williams was at the pinnacle of his career during the years that he was with Frank. The ones just after streetcar, the years of Katana Hot Tin Roof and Night of the Iguana and suddenly last summer and Sweeper of Youth and the Rose Tattoo, the play that Williams dedicated to Frank and also the play that's just been brought back to Broadway this fall with Marisa Tome. Even if you don't read this novel, I want you to know that after Frank died in 1953, Williams went into a depression, sorry, 1963. Williams went into a depression from which he never recovered and that he wrote every single day after Frank died for 20 more years but he never had another hit. So what was the alchemy between these two men? What was it like for Frank to live in that double closet, the traditional closet and the closet of anonymity and why, if you believe Tennessee's memoirs, did Frank never once in their 15 years together tell him that he loved him when he clearly did? So I'm gonna read a little bit from the book but before I do, I wanted to bring in two minutes of Tennessee Williams. I couldn't access any film or audio or Frank but it seems only fair that since I've spent so much time with Williams mining his and Frank's lives, I should let him speak about Frank in his own words. So he only wrote a couple poems about Frank but the most enduring one is called The Little Horse which is the nickname that he had for Frank who he said was like, Frank was like a short kind of, had like a wrestler body and he said he looked like a little horse and so that's what he called him and that's the title of the poem and they met in Provincetown and Frank was always sort of the reliable one and the sort of steady one and Williams kind of infantilized him a little bit and so you can see some of that in this poem. For Frank Meru. Minion he was, or Minion he was. I said to his ear, he was wrong to me. My name for him was The Little Horse. I fear he has no name for me. I came up on the mobile sign in an accident but he has been. Something started off, something stopped and they are five hours and they are the three and then it rained but Little Horse had brought along his power to me. Petit Cheval had kept quite dry until he divided it with me for it was late and I was lost when Little Horse inquired of me what had the bark but it cannot bite and I was right. It was a dream. Minion he is, or Minion he is. I have that pleasure. He is wrong to me. My name for him is Little Horse. I wish he had the name for me. So we can bring up the lights I guess so I can see a little bit. So I wanted to read just a little bit from the book and I thought, I always changed my mind like midway through but I want to read just a short section actually sort of a combination of scenes that are put together that has a little bit of Frank and Anya together since the novel is really about, often about their really, as much about their friendship as it is about Frank's relationship with Tennessee. So this is a condensed excerpt. Frank is narrating, he's narrating from Memorial Hospital in 1963. The night before this scene, Frank and Tennessee have met four new friends at a party thrown by Chairman Capote which you already know. Notably the Swedish mother and daughter dressed in identical white dresses and for those of you who know the place on the last summer much of this chapter is a warped retelling. Okay. I also thought it was sort of a little bit dreary today and this is a beach scene so I thought I would give us a little beach scene. They found the private section of the beach reserved for guests of the Splendido, the hotel where they're staying. Angled their chairs toward the sun and lay side by side in a perfect row surrounded on all sides by perfect rows a grid of bodies presenting themselves for the delectation of the gods. The first time Frank encountered an Italian beach he was shocked by its military precision. The sections organized by color and pattern, the cabanas numbered to correspond with the umbrellas, the young men who came through twice a day to rake the sand. In Jersey, you brought an old bed sheet and a cooler and six cousins and set up shop on the first free spot. Your knees rubbed against the hairy back of the guy next to you and nobody squawked about it. There was pleasure in the Italian order. You knew your place and your color and your pattern. Nobody stole your watch but he missed the messy collage of Monmouth and Asbury Park where you tripped over radios and inflatable balls and the pots and pans people brought from their kitchens to make sand castles. Anyone for a swim, he shouted down the silent row. Frank wasn't the type to lie around. If 10 were here, he'd at least be telling a story. I'll go in, Anya said, languidly, but not for a while, I'm still cooking. She and her mother wore tight fitting one piece swimsuits that barely covered their thighs and which tied behind their necks in a little bow. Matching white bands frame their faces and expose their foreheads to the rays. Did they own any clothes that weren't the brightest white and did they only buy them in pairs? They were a blank canvas inviting you to paint them and yet they were also forbiddingly pristine. You wanted to drown these women in colored ink and you wanted to shield them from the slightest smudge. Their skin was smooth and unbroken by moles or blemishes or hair. Their legs and arms shellacked with oil that smelled of rosemary. They wore no makeup, no adornments or jewels. What had looked last night like flecks of gray in Anya's eyes were now in the bright sun at the edge of the brilliant bay, a chalky white, like little chips in a blue plate. He wanted to tell her that the white was like the crashing surf and her eyes like the water but that was more of his bad poetry and besides, Ten accused him of flirting too much with women. He did it more out of habit and manners and genuine appreciation than desire. In general, Frank wanted people to feel good about themselves. When they did, they made better company and he had more fun and wasn't having fun the point of everything. Sitting around in a beach chair was no fun at all. He looked around for someone to talk to but the only person he recognized was Luca, the boat guy, turned luggage guy, turned delivery guy, turned driver guy who stood with his fellow ragazzi over by his truck. Frank gave him a little wave. Should he approach him, propose a game of soccer maybe? Luca lifted his chin at him as if to say, what do you need now? By which he surely meant, what do you need now, pervert? It was always a walk across fire with these men for even the most innocent of purposes and it was even riskier without Ten here. A pack of younger boys were gathered behind Luca and his friends. They offered scooter rides to the tourists and rented them bikes by the hour. In a few years, they'd graduate to driving the tourists around in little vans. Frank wondered what if anything Luca would graduate into or whether he'd just stay here driving starlets and rich queens around for the rest of his life. To Anya, he said, I must inform you that you're turning pink. Come cool off with me. The skin burns faster in the water, no? She asked. That's a myth, Frank said. Saltwater actually protects the skin, coats it in a kind of film. Look at me. He took a step back so she could admire his bronzed body. I spent hours a day ocean swimming and I never get sunburned. She eyed him skeptically. Trust me, he said. I lie only to men. In the bay, they floated beside each other for a long time. She cupped handfuls of the salty water, splashed it onto her face and then rubbed it in like cold cream. Next you'll tell me that Paraji, that's the name of the beach, is the fountain of youth, she said. She ticked her head toward the chairs. When I am her age, I'll return here looking the same. First though, said Anya, she had to find her mother a husband. Only after she was settled could Anya breathe and choose her city and make her own way in the world. It was something, she said, bringing up a mother. It took patience and a hard heart. You had to give her the illusion of control and maintain a clinical distance from the decisions you made for her, decisions she believed to be her own, but for which she took no responsibility. Only then would she release you. She had every intention about living you, of living forever, in fact, which gave you plenty of time to muck around New York or Paris or wherever your dreams took you. As long as those dreams of yours were so big, they had no chance of coming true. One day, far into the future, broken but not destroyed, you could return to her and she could mother you again, except that it would be the first time. Anya hated modeling, she told Frank. If she did aspire to act as her mother claimed, it was only to give her brain and her limbs something to do while the cameras were on her. Becoming an actress was more her mother's dream for her than her own dream for herself. And as such, it would propel her out of her mother's orbit. She was 22. By her own admission, she knew everything and nothing. She would never marry, she said, not unless the man allowed her to be a glutton, not just on art and ideas, but on other men too. He would have to be very strong. And from what Anya had already seen, strong men with an appreciation for art and ideas seemed to prefer the company of other men and not of women, especially women who required that particular form of strength. This wasn't the conversation Frank hoped for or expected from this girl. He tried to interrupt with stories of his own mother and sisters, their small, aproned lives he'd looked upon with pity and a kind of envy, so sure they were of their place in their house, in their square block of Jersey, the world. At Anya's age, he'd fled from their sites each morning in his uncle's truck to make his deliveries. In the afternoons, he'd pick up his buddies and park at the beach for hours, smoking and whistling from the front seat of the truck at the girls stepping down from the boardwalk. Then he'd fled from them too, those flightless boys, first for the war and then when the war spit him out, spit him back onto shore for the city. It was the city, he told Anya, where his eyes finally adjusted, where he could see men as if for the first time, leading him into unmarked doorways and the bright life behind them. She had no one to confide in, she said, no one to wrestle with, to discover, to tease back. For all her mother's ambitions, she kept her away from friends they'd made on their travels. She believed young women should remain mysterious, an unwritten story, whereas older women needed to perfect the art of storytelling in order to remain visible, to survive. What I find from men of your type, she said, is that you always want women to perform for you. We did this for Truman in the weeks after we came here. All over France we did this, Vienna too. What we wondered to each other though, my dear mother and me, walking all the way to this beach up the hill and then down from Portofino because no one offered to drive us, is what happens at the end of the performance. You walked here, Frank asked, why didn't you ask Luca? We wondered, she went on, if we'll have a place to go after the curtain comes down, if we'll be safe there, if we'll have enough to eat, we wonder if we'll still interest you. Is there a place to dance in Portofino, Frank Astor, hopefully? She said there was a small club, but that it was too loud to hear yourself think. Why do you need to think if you're dancing, Frank Astor? When they saw Ten step from the truck, it must have been four o'clock by then, they waved to him and pointed to the splendido section. I have to go in, Frank said, will you stay? No, she said, but she made no move toward the shore. He didn't know if it was just how the light was hitting her, but from this angle he could see through the fabric of her swimsuit. He offered to race her, intending to lose by a length. She shook her head. Are you really leaving us this week, she asked him. He reminded her of the trip to Verona for the censor script. Lucchino Visconti, the director, was insisting on the poetry of the dialogue and Ten needed to hold himself up in a hotel to write it. They were meeting Paul Bowles and his new lover, Ahmed, who were on their way up from Rome. That's him, she said, what about you? Do you go everywhere together? Not always, said Frank. Do you have a new lover waiting for you in Verona? Not in Verona, said Frank. Then there's a chance our show will go on here, she said. I suppose there is, he said. Her mother was gone now, of course. Anya's most recent letter came posted from Madrid, where she'd been filming. She couldn't get to New York until the fall, she wrote, but surely Frank would be out of the hospital long before then. The cobalt treatments would do the trick this time. She had enclosed a Polaroid from a recent shoot in Marrakesh, her head wrapped in a scarf, looking bored and triumphant astride a camel. She insisted on seeing him in Spain for the holidays. She loved Madrid so much that she'd purchased a floor through apartment in a ramshackle building in La Latina, though she rarely spent more than a few nights in a row there. Sometimes Frank imagined this apartment, which he'd seen only in Anya's exuberant descriptions as his next home. The sloping stucco butter yellow walls, the tall windows dripping with flowers, the wrought iron balcony that overlooked the tight oppressed streets of the Plaza de San Andres. He'd roam these streets in the evenings on his way to late night resistance meetings. He'd provide aid to the artists, he'd run money, arms, whatever the movement found necessary in this next imagined, impossible life. He will finally be put to good use. He set the photo on the little table next to the vases of flowers. With the last of the day's strength, he turned a page of the letter over and scribbled, come now, please, I need you. One word per line, like a madman's ransom note. He tucked the page back in the envelope, sealed it with a little spit, and what was left of the glue wrote return to sender on the front and handed it to the nurse. For the rest of the day, a thousand hollow hours he slept. He had no trouble nodding off though he woke often and couldn't dream. The men in his ward, their sudden shouts and strangled gurgles kept him in that shallow pool of sleep. He didn't mind the men. Their bodies and voices and breath kept him company as they'd had in his navy days. You couldn't convince him he wasn't back with his squadron, that they weren't sailing out first thing. Quit clowning, Merlot, one of them said. Nikki, seahawk, get some shut eye, we need your legs. When the night nurse woke him, she told him that he'd had a few visitors. Al and Dan, his sister Connie, the priest. There was always a priest. To the priest, Frank was carrying. He'd be back. The others too, Vivian Lee, who'd thrown a party in his honor weeks before, Irene Selznick dropped off an expensive tin of sweets. Someone else had called on the phone, the nurse said, but didn't leave a name or a message. Man or woman, Frank asked her. Woman, woman, Frank repeated. What was it this time, he wondered? A crisis of staging, some diva actress pitching a fit, was his precious angel reading from a book of poems. No, 10 had sent angel back to Key West. This time, it was the premiere of Milk Train down in Virginia. Frank pulled the sheets up to his chin and turned on his side, wincing at the pressure of his ribs on the mattress. The nurse's shadow disappeared from the wall. He pushed the button to get her back. He needed a blanket. He needed two blankets and the oxygen. Every shiver turned the vice tighter on his chest tender bones. He could feel the necrosis in his lips, blue as ice, his skin cracking. He pushed the button again. This place couldn't hold him. He would get to Spain. Anya would come and smuggle him out. Ten used to tease Frank about his daydreams, his giddy contemplations, how he always jumped ahead to the happy ending, a different way of ending happy each time. Even that night in Portofino, in the nameless bar drunk to high heaven, Ten had proclaimed to their new friends with pride, there are roses tattooed in my Frankie's eyes. And he was right. Never, not for one moment did Frank fear what Ten feared, what most men feared, which was that he would die alone. It was funny how it had all turned out, wasn't it Ten? Wasn't it almost funny? Stop there. So I'm happy to answer any, see we have the 15 minutes, so I ended right on time and I'm happy about that. So we have 15 minutes I think from questions. Is that right? Until 5.30, okay. And so I'm happy to answer any questions at all about any aspect of this, the research, the writing, grub street, et cetera. The recipes. How long did it take to write the book, including research? Well, so this is sort of a weird one because not a weird question, but a weird answer. Weird situation, which is that I first, so it was the late 90s, like 1997 or so, when I read that memoir that I had mentioned where I found I learned about Frank, this Italian-American guy like me who was dying in this hospital room and his partner, Tennessee Williams, wasn't visiting him. And I was just so struck by that that I was soon in a graduate writing program. And, well, I thought at the time, like I want to write about that, but I'm not a biographer, so I didn't know that you, I thought you had to write nonfiction in order to write about real people. And so then I had, and then I sort of started to think more and I looked around and this film came out called Gods and Monsters, wonderful movie in the late 90s and it took the real guy, the director of Frankenstein, James Whale, and it made him a character and then invented all of these other characters around him and told really the story of him and of Frankenstein, the movie, and the bride of Frankenstein through this fictional retelling about this real person. And I was just sort of blown away, like you could do that, you could make up something about a real person and call him with this real name. So, and then I read the book afterwards that it was based on. And so I wrote a short story in my graduate program in which Frank and Tennessee were characters. And it was the only story in the entire graduate writing program that my professor liked. And everything else was like led to slaughter. But so it really stuck with me but I didn't, I felt like that wasn't enough and I didn't know what the bigger story was and I didn't really know how to tell it. So I knew I wanted to write a novel. So when it came time to really sit down and write a novel, I wrote a novel that was based on something I knew much better which was my family's story, my immigrant parents and I sort of took them as inspirations for characters and wrote my first novel about them and then wrote a sequel to that and then wrote a sequel to that. So I had three novels and during that time I still couldn't quite shake this other story. So during that time I was researching, taking notes, watching Tennessee Williams plays, going to Italy and sort of doing all this kind of research on the side, like cheating on the books that I was actually working on and then I wrote another book, a book of essays and then finally I kind of like after making all those notes all those years and thinking and thinking and thinking through what the plot could look like I finally started writing this book itself but that was 2013. So that was like 16 years after I first got to the story. So it was a long process and then once 2013 hit, that was when I really dug deep and really started building out the story and where the pieces of the Anya character and of the John Horn Burns character all came together. So I apologize for the long answer but it's an unconventional story because my other books took me, like my first book took about three years, the next book took two years and then book after that took seven years and for various reasons and but this one total took a lot longer. Yeah, so yeah, so one thing I didn't mention is that as part of the, so I mentioned that one of the plot lines is that Anya has this sort of Tennessee Williams play that he wrote for her before he died like a few months before he died that she's been holding on to her whole life. Mainly because she doesn't think it's very good and she's sort of embarrassed by it and she didn't want it to be out there because it's not a good play and she knew he wrote it when he was sort of struggling and addicted to pills and all sorts of things. So she sort of kept it under wraps and then a couple people come into her life to try to get her and know about the play and try to get her to unearth it and to put it on and she's very resistant. So I knew I wanted that to be a plot line and then I realized kind of midway through that, oh, I think that means I actually have to write that play. That play, I have to at least know what's in it but I also might have to actually write it. So if you page through the book you can see that about at the 60 or 70% mark there's a play and it's a Tennessee Williams play that is written by me and it's the only way I could write it was because it's a bad Tennessee Williams play. Like I couldn't try to write a good Tennessee Williams play but I could, I think I could write a bad Tennessee Williams play. So I wanted to make it short so that it wouldn't take up too much on the short side. So, because it wouldn't want you to be taken too far out of the sort of fictional dream and most importantly I wanted it to add something like new information or deepened information to the plot. So really in the play you see like Williams is I think love for Frank and how his life has been kind of like upended and in a way destroyed by the loss of him and I wanted that to be a part of the play. So when you read the play you're really because it's important to note that Williams is not a point of view character in this novel. We're never in his head, we're only in Frank's head. So you don't really get access to how he really feels and the play is actually the way you get into his head. It's sort of like what Williams would have said about Frank if he could. So I was very, I left it to almost last to write because I was so anxious about and I was so worried that I would get taken to task for even attempting to write a Tennessee Williams play. And thankfully I've done a lot of events with Tennessee Williams scholars and gone to Tennessee Williams conferences and things. And people have been for the most part like really generous about that. And they've supported me having written this play. The only people who've been resistant to it are people. There are a lot of people out there who don't like this narrative that Williams never wrote another great play after Frank died. They're really, that's sort of a commonly held belief. I mean, it's definitely true that he never had a big hit but a lot of people say he never wrote another good play. And so they don't like, but some people really think some of his later plays are really good. So they don't like the fact that I'm sort of perpetuating this idea that Williams never wrote another good play. And then not only that, but I added a bad play, another bad play to the canon, so they didn't like that. But otherwise people have been really nice. Yeah, a good bad play, right? Yeah, but a writer like Williams is, I mean, a lot of people don't, I mean, some people don't realize that what an incredible impact he had on American theater and theater around the world. I mean, his plays, I set up a Google alert for Tennessee Williams and every day I see there are just plays going up all over the world still and next to Shakespeare and Chekhov or whatever so he's one of the most produced playwrights all over the world. And they're constantly re-adaptations, re-imaginings of his plays going up all the time. So people are very invested in him as a real person and in his legacy. So I knew I would encounter that when I took him on, which is part of the reason, the last thing I'll say is that about this question is I didn't write this book to offer new insight into Tennessee Williams, the character, the person or the playwright. There's been so much written about him, so many wonderful biographies and his own journals and notebooks and memoirs are so chock full of great information and really, really, really interesting. I had nothing really new to add to him as a playwright, but I did feel like I wanted to tell Frank's story and to sort of to get at what their relationship meant because they don't feel like that story has been told as well. Yes. That's it. Okay. Can you talk about the Mario's in the beginning? Are those, and you said you didn't really have much to add to Tennessee Williams' character, so that was real. Yeah, so in the novel, I'm actually sort of amazed that my editor and my publisher were cool with this, but the very first scene is, one of the very first scenes is a scene of Frank in Tennessee walking through Rome and essentially picking up a guy. And they did that. They had a very open relationship and they had those kinds of relationships. And they were very devoted to each other as a couple, but they had, as I said, a very open relationship. So, and that was, but that's not news. Like that's if you, they were both open about that and Williams was very open about that in his own journals and memoirs, wrote a lot about that. So it wasn't actually new information, but it was, but they're not, like it wasn't a guy named Mario, but it's a guy that stands for that. So does that answer the question? Yeah. And what's one of the things I wanted to explore was what does fidelity really mean in a relationship? You know, that you could be, you could have a relationship in which you are devoted to each other, where you take care of each other, but you don't necessarily have a traditional relationship. And of course, at the time, there was no such thing as same-sex marriage. There were no models for any kind of relationship. So they were sort of figuring it out on their own. So I wanted that to be a part of the book as well. So. A good question. I was saying to Susan, I think that every day, it seems like there's, I get another idea for somebody that I, something that I want to write about next. And sometimes it's completely fictional, and sometimes it's a character like, or a real person that I feel like has, that could like Frank like be brought into the light, you know, so, but I haven't kind of, I haven't decided yet. So it may, it may, I may write another type of book like this where I'm kind of using a real person, or I may just start completely, you know, from scratch and just go on. And pure imagination, we'll see. I think, you know, these novels are such, my God, they take so long, they have to take so long to marinate and to live with them for so long that you have to really be committed to the topic and to the characters. So I think part of the reason why this book ultimately appeared is that I was, I really, I absolutely love these characters so much. And Frank in particular, I like, yeah. I mean, I just like, and especially like with the world as it is, like I just wanted to be there with them, you know, in 1953, you know, and in Italy. And I just kind of, you just absolutely have to have that kind of passion for the character and the mission of the book, whatever it is. And for me, the mission was to get Frank into the light. So, yeah. Well, I think that, yeah, I mean, of course, I mean, on some level, absolutely, in terms of the credit he's been given, but also the treatment from Williams, because Williams was a difficult person. I don't necessarily think he was, it's not, the book's not meant to like indict him for being a bad person. He was limited and had his own, you know, demons. And I truly believe that he loved Frank deeply. But he, you know, it's cliche, but he didn't love himself enough, you know, to really be able to express that for Frank. But Frank, I feel like Frank, like his true calling was not, he wasn't an aspiring dancer, actor, writer, but his true, but he didn't really have the talent in any of those areas. His true calling, I think, was as a caretaker. And I think that he, that was what he kind of was born to do, you know? Exactly, he was his leading man, right? And so, and I think that, you know, when people are caretakers, they give themselves over so much to people that they allow, sometimes allow themselves to be, like, what's the word, like, steamrolled, you know, that's what I was looking for. You know, and kind of, and their own identity kind of taken away. And I wanted to explore that as well. So, yeah, yeah, that's it. You could finally answer your question now. Good question, yeah. So, I had to get ahead of Frank, which that was a challenge, because Frank, there's not, all that we know of Frank is from letters that he, so I read the letters that they wrote to each other. I read letters that Frank wrote to other people, that other people wrote to Frank, that I read biographies, of course, that mentioned Frank, and that did their own research into Frank's life. But there was no, there's no one alive who, like, really knew him well enough to even, and so I didn't really feel like it was necessary to, like, dive into that. I really felt like it was important for me to create the, like, he's always gonna be, every real character, every character who was a real person is always gonna be an interpretation, right? So, I created an interpretation of Frank based on my own understanding of him, and so that, you know, that's really what I wanted to do, so I, and he still has family around in New Jersey, but none of them really knew him. In fact, once he, so, William's, eventually, he gave the eulogy at Frank's funeral, and which, you know, in Patterson, Peterstown, New Jersey, and, you know, the greatest living playwright of 20th century gives the eulogy for someone in your family, and then what does this, and I know these people well, what does this Italian-American working-class family do? They bury Frank, and then they bury his memory. They never speak of him again, and so there is actually the next generation didn't even know that Williams, Tennessee Williams was their uncle Frank's, or great uncle Frank's partner, right? In fact, there's an actor, his name is Joey Merlot, Frank's great nephew, great, great nephew, something like that, who's in his 20s now, who didn't know about his uncle until he got to college, I think, and he himself is a gay aspiring actor and dancer, and he looks just like him, and so he is out there, like he's acting, and he's actually writing a play about Frank as well, but I say that only to say that he knew as little about Frank as I did, even from having been in their family, so yeah. But I have heard from some members of the Merlot family, they had written to me and said, well, all the Merlot's have read it, and we really love it, and I was like, thank God, I was like so nervous, you know? So yeah, I even said like, come by, we'll feed you, I was like, okay, I really, I totally relate to that, you know? So yeah, that was cool. Are there events? Yes, yeah. Because I think that the necessary operation, especially for people, I know a lot of gay people in the closet. Yeah, that's where I first heard about it. Yeah. I would kind of ask you about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you kind of resublimate it, you know, by making it an actuation. Right. For it, and as you've been talking, I've been realizing that, you know, the Tennessee Williams that you write in the book is not, is anguished, but he's not anguished in that kind of closety way. Right, right. Exactly. I was wondering how deliberate you were thinking about that. I was very deliberate about that because he, he actually, I sort of disagree with the, with the, well, I disagree in, this is gonna be, what? Disagree in kind of degree, I guess, or quality with the, with the interpretation of Williams's like internalized homophobia or whatever, whatever you want to call it. I, absolutely there. I mean, there's no question. And, and, but the way that it gets played out in his plays, each play kind of handles it differently. I mean, you can look at Blanche Dubois as a kind of, you know, I mean, as many people do as a sort of version of himself. But Williams did not struggle with his, with his homosexuality in this, in the traditional way that we sort of want to impose on him. Like, he didn't feel, you know, you know, ashamed, dirty, et cetera, the way that, but obviously on some level he did because it came out in these characters. So it was like an aspect of his psyche that he maybe wasn't fully in touch with, right? But I didn't want that to be, that was not what I was interested in talking about in this, in this novel because, again, I feel like that had been kind of discussed a lot. And what I was more interested in is how people use each other and how gay men and women use each other. So the scene that I read for you a little bit from where she's sort of saying like, we perform for you and they perform for her and we sort of, and people exploit each other. I was sort of more interested in that aspect of the, of the, of the play. I was also interested in violence that is done toward women and that gets kind of then set aside and exploited in itself for narrative, which is what happens in this novel. He sort of takes that scene that happens at the, at, in Portofino and turns it into something else uses it, you know? And it's also, it's like about, so the play, sorry, it's probably, if you don't know the story, it's not that interesting, but the play itself is kind of like, the real play that he wrote suddenly last summer is more revealing of him than he realizes. And the, in the novel, in this novel, the play that he writes, which is also suddenly last summer, from the fake events that happened in the play also reveals more about him, which it reveals kind of his exploitative nature or the exploitative nature of art in general. So anyway, that's sort of like the long answer again to the, to the question. But I would love to, like, the whole scene is so weird and so disturbing and upsetting in the real play. And I wanted to recreate that in the novel. And in both cases, the novel and the play, it resists one interpretation. Like, it's not meant to be about one thing. It's meant to be about a bunch of different, sometimes contradictory things. So, yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, cause to me it wasn't, it wasn't the peak. It wasn't, it was the, it was one piece of their experience, you know? And, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Fred Armisen. Yeah, I was, do I have, sorry, for one minute? Okay. But, yeah, like, it was the weirdest thing. I was, I was like asleep and my phone was like going crazy. Like, I was woken up by my, by my phone vibrating and I look at my texts and I get all these texts from messages from people that I hadn't talked to in years. And, and I just was saying, Seth Meyers, Seth Meyers, Seth Meyers. I'm like, did he die? And like, did like, and why do I care? I mean, like, I like Seth Meyers, but like, why are they so upset about Seth Meyers? And so it turned out that like, Seth Meyers has a segment on his show where Fred, when Fred Armisen comes on, they show him a cover of a book and Fred has to guess what the book is about based on just the cover and the title. And so they discussed this book, like the fake version of this book, which is actually so wonderfully like, like appropriate because like, there's a fake play and there's a fake character in a real story and they were doing a fake version of the book about a fake event anyway. So it all sort of worked and Fred told this hilarious kind of interpretation of this cover and then Seth like read, like read the back of the book and had the book up like on the screen for like a very long time. It was like the best advertisement you could get. But ironically, like my Amazon ranking went down. Like, or like, I don't know, it was really weird. Like it had no effect on sales. It was very interesting. I think because, you know, he couldn't really tell what it was about. So, but it was still really, really fun. Yeah, it was really fun. All right, well, thank you, Chris and thanks to everybody for coming on. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. I'll remind you there are books for sale in the back. If anybody would like to purchase books, Chris would be happy to sign them. And otherwise for, hopefully we'll see you the rest of you in November for a couple of other events here.