Linked by: Emanuel Xavier
The Rules: Answer the ten questions about your
current book or work-in-progress and tag five other writers/bloggers and add
their links so we can hop over and meet them.
What is the working title of your book?
Michael Furey.
Where did the idea come from for the
book?
I was cleaning out my closet over
Christmas and I found my old journals. There are about 900 pages and they run
from 1987 to about 2004. I never thought very much of what they contained but I
started reading them and I was surprised with what I found. I found myself, my
forgotten self, my real self, the person I was before I was on Facebook. I had
just moved to New York from Boston. I found myself at Columbia University, cataloging
books under the supervision of a sadistic Czech straight out of Kafka. I
experienced the mental collapse of one boyfriend as I abandoned him for
another. I studied a paystub, deciding between rice and new socks. I praised
God for bottomless cups of coffee and played pool in the basement of the
Hungarian Pastry Shop. I smoked incessantly. I attended choral Vespers at St.
John the Divine so I could see the great rosette stained glass window saturated
with glory in the summer dusk. I contemplated suicide when it was hot. I
learned to live without air conditioning in the summer and heat in the winter. I
improvised sleds out of cardboard boxes. I wrote my first real poem, a love
poem, to persuade my boyfriend not to leave me. He left anyway. With poetic justice, I heard my glasses
plop into the Hudson as I was fucking a particularly sweet piece of anonymity: and
I did not miss a beat—knowing those glasses were gone and Michael was gone and I
might as well get off and get on with life. Art would have to wait. In those notebooks, I found New York
as I first experienced it: fully illustrated, in the richest colors of
innocence and experience imaginable.
What genre does your book fall under?
I am using four books as models: Candide, Portrait Of The Artist As
A Young Man, Dubliners, and Speak, Memory. Fiction is the safest
category. I will have to combine characters, change names, and invent dialogue
that I can’t remember.
Which actors would you choose to play
your characters in a movie rendition?
I have no idea. I would hate to see
anybody else saddled with the burden of trying to be me. Even I can’t do it.
And I have been trying for 44 years.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of
your book?
It could be worse.
Will your book be self-published or
represented by an agency?
I don’t know. I might shop it around and
see if there are any nibbles. I normally like to publish things myself.
How long did it take you to write the
first draft of your manuscript?
I am still writing it. I have about
10,000 words so far. I hoped it would take a year. But novel writing is new to
me and I am a pretty stern and unforgiving taskmaster. Maybe two or three
years.
What other books would you compare this
story to within your genre?
That is a difficult question. I am consciously
using four other books as points of reference, as I mentioned up above, but I
wouldn’t want to compare them.
Who or what inspired you to write this
book?
There is a scene at the end of Joyce’s Dubliners where a wife tells her husband
about the first man she loved, a lad named Michael Furey. She enters a convent
and Michael Furey dies—of a chill he caught imploring her to run away with him.
I have been fascinated with that scene and that decision ever since I read the
story, ‘The Dead’, in high school. For years, I wondered how I would react in a
similar situation. When I moved to New York, I didn’t exactly find myself in a
convent, but I did find myself jobless, rapidly running out of money, stuck in
a lonely relationship with somebody I didn’t love. Then, I found a job at
Columbia. There, I met a beautiful young man named Michael. We went out for
beer, Guinness. After five or six pints, he confessed his love for Dostoyevsky
and short guys. I confessed my love of long hair and Joyce. He invited me to
come to his apartment. I went. In that instant, art became life and life became
art. I only realized what I had done to myself and everybody else in my journals when I read again about how I lost my
glasses in the Hudson. In fact, I think that will be the final scene in the
book: losing my glasses in the Hudson. I have just decided.
What else about your book might pique
the reader’s interest?
There will be library sex. Everybody
loves library sex. Even librarians.
Who I’m tagging:
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