Andrew Roe

Ethan: “You should shave your beard, Daddy.”

Me: “Really? If I shaved my beard you might not recognize me anymore. You’ll be: ‘Hey, who is that guy?'”

Ethan: “Noooo. I’d recognize you.”

Me: “Mommy might not.”

Ethan: “You should shave your head too, like Myles [a friend/coworker].”

Me: “That wouldn’t be a good look for me I don’t think. Only certain people can pull that off. Like Myles. Besides, then you definitely wouldn’t recognize me.”

Ethan: “I’d still recognize you, Daddy.”

I’m always interested in what sparks/starts a novel or a story.

Here’s what Junot Diaz told an interviewer about how The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao began:

“I was living in Mexico City… It was very late, and we were over at a friend’s house; the guy’s house who I was at turned out to—in the future—turned out to be a very famous Mexican actor. But that night we were just all hanging out and it was a bunch of Mexican bohemians and me and my Guatemalan buddy. And one of these Mexican cats just pulled a book off a shelf and just cornered me and was like, ‘My favorite writer in the world.’ He was telling me, ‘My favorite writer in the world is Oscar Wao, I love Oscar Wao, Oscar Wao is brilliant.’ And I was dying because I knew he meant Oscar Wilde. That’s where the book began. After that party I went home and I laid in bed, and I suddenly had this idea of this fore-cursed family. This idea of this awkward fat boy and this idea that this family would be cursed in love, that they would have great trouble finding love. You know it just felt like a real good kind of novella, telenovela type plot. I just thought, ‘Hey, I can work with this, you know, I can really change this into something else.'”

So the mispronounciation of a name begins it all. I like that.

And speaking of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: I’ve been reading this book off and on for over six months. I’m really enjoying it (it’s big, bold, daring, full of life and funny as hell), but my reading time is so limited. Maybe I’ll be done by the end of the year. Makes me feel guilty when it takes so long to finish reading a book I really like.

Here’s how Colum McCann answered that itch-inducing question in an interview on the Powell’s Books Blog:

“Thomas Berger has the most beautiful answer to this question. ‘Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there.’ Enough said. Or almost enough said. Vallejo said that mystery joins us together. And Joyce said that he wanted to create life out of life.”

Yes. Because. It. Isn’t. There.

I’d never heard that Berger quote before.

And here’s another question/answer from the McCann interview I found interesting, given my appreciation of Don DeLillo:

“If you could have been someone else, who would that be and why?
“I teach at Hunter College in New York and recently had Don DeLillo come to class. It was an extraordinary day. He was incredibly profound and moving and gracious and just plain honest with the students. I was also stunned by his humility. At one stage he said to us, ‘I seem to be the beneficiary of an occasional revelation.’ This is the man who wrote Underworld, one of the best novels of the last 25 years. We went out afterwards with a couple of students and had dinner, and a few drinks, and I watched him climb into a cab, and I thought that I would like to be that mind, I would like to sit inside that mind, if even just for a while, traveling home to Bronxville on a March night in 2009. I would very much like that indeed, to be going in that direction.”