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Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Wally Lamb is the author of seven New York Times bestselling novels: The River Is Waiting, I'll Take You There, We Are Water, Wishin' and Hopin', The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much Is True, and She's Come Undone. Lamb also edited Couldn't Keep It to Myself and I'll Fly Away, two volumes of essays from students in his writing workshop at York Correctional Institution, a women's prison in Connecticut, where he was a volunteer facilitator for twenty years. Lamb lives in Connecticut with his wife, Christine, and they have three sons.
Wally Lamb's website
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What inspired you to write The River Is Waiting? How much of Corby Ledbetter's journey came from real-life experiences versus pure imagination?
Starting a novel is always difficult for me. I usually begin by going back to ancient folktales and myths—the stories that have withstood the test of time because people need them to be told and retold. In 2018, I discovered a Mexican folktale called "The Weeping Woman." It's about a ghost who wanders near bodies of water, mourning the loss of her children whom she has drowned. The River Is Waiting goes far afield from that story but it, too, is about a parent who mourns a child for whose death he is responsible and who goes to the river to seek his truths.
As to real-life experiences, the writer Tom Drury said it best when he answered this perennial question: How much of you is there in your characters? Think of it this way, Drury said. A fiction writer takes a baseball bat to a stained-glass portrait of himself. Then he sits before the broken pieces and creates a whole different portrait. There are shards of me in Corby, but he and I are different people.
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