Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Chris Adrian was born in Washington, D.C. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he received his MD from East Virginia Medical School. "Every Night for a Thousand Years", the New Yorker story from which this novel stemmed, was anthologized in Best American Short Stories 1998.. His fiction has also appeared in The Paris Review, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, and Story.
Mr. Adrian is Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Columbia University Medical Center.
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What was the inspiration for Gob's Grief? Was it the period, the plot,
a character?
My brother died in an automobile accident in 1993, and shortly after that I
started a novel about an actor who plays a physician on a soap-opera. It bears
no resemblance to Gob's Grief but shares with it a title and a concern
with characters, living and dead, who try variously to understand, deny, accept,
or defeat their mortality. The novel underwent many transmogrifications of plot,
character, and setting, some of them truly strange and even a little gruesome,
before a friend introduced me to Mrs. Woodhull, and Mrs. Woodhull introduced me
to a New York in the years after the Civil War. I credit Mrs. Woodhull with
saving what was otherwise doomed to be a failed effort and probably a lifelong
source of misery for the author. I think I can safely call her and her time the
inspiration for the book, while the events in my life that required me to write
this novel are perhaps best called something else that connotes less airy joy
and more unhappy obsession. I suppose I could call it the desperation, rather
than the inspiration, for the novel. In any case, I wanted to write a story
where somebody gets his ...
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