A Q&A with Thomas Christopher Greene

Many thanks for all the great questions for the author. As of 5/18 these have been forwarded to him to answer. As soon as I hear back I'll post back.

This thread is now closed to additional questions.

Thank you!

Davina (BookBrowse editor)

Partially because it is so taboo, and it was a window on the world of academia, but more importantly, because it allowed me to tell the larger story I wanted to tell, which was about these two people, their marriage, and the nature of grief.

I didn’t, though I think he was clearly experiencing a form of psychosis.

I think so. Place is very important in my work. New England is what I know and there is also certain cache and particular ethos to the New England boarding school experience. Very gothic.

I like all of them, which may surprise people, because clearly some are unhappy and some, I suppose Arthur, are villainous. But there is humanity and fragility in all of them. Of course, Russell is a gem, especially his ability to forgive.

I think processing tragedy through artistic expression is always cathartic. So yes. Putting my thoughts on paper helped me tremendously in dealing with them. Especially Elizabeth who in the second half I identify most with.

I think ultimately it is Elizabeth’s story, more than Arthur’s. Her choices define what happens in the book. Plus, it mirrors the dramatic ruse of the structure.

Yes, I think so. It sets the scene and the tone. And like Shakespeare said, you haven’t lived until you conceive of life as tragedy.

No, initially I wanted to write a novel about a soldier returning from the Iraq war. The beginning of that first novel survives here in the opening section of part 2. But I didn’t know a lot about Iraq and I didn’t know a lot about being a soldier. Then my own life changed and I decided to write a completely different novel. I kept having this image coming to me over an older man bereft and walking at the edge of the woods. After several drafts, I knew how to attack it, though it took some trial and error to figure out the ultimate structure of the book and in the end, that was indeed a surprise.

It's weird but I found the NICU a decent place to write. There was so much noise, as you know, and there have been recent studies that have compared life in the NICU for parents of critically ill children as very similar to combat—great moments of terror followed by long passages of boredom, as someone famously once described it. I have always written well in noisy places like coffee shops. There were times when I was there with Jane and she was asleep and found solace in doing something, in creating something, and fiction was what I knew. So I wrote. That said, most of this book was written after she died.

I think grief has the ability to tear apart a marriage and I was very interested in understanding this through the act of writing fiction. Fiction, I think it’s important to note, functions, in some ways, as an explication of conflict. I think you can either fall or apart or figure your way through. I asked the question: what happens if everything falls apart? This idea greatly informed the novel. My wife has become used to the idea of being married to a novelist, I think, and knows that my novels are works of fiction but that within them she will recognize strong kernels of truth.

I think I poured a big piece of my heart into this book. I was less aware of the artifice of writing a novel and just letting it go—raw emotion, sometimes ugly, sometimes beautiful, but always very real, I hope. Especially Elizabeth’s point of view—what she feels following the loss of her son I identified with closely.