Hawthorne Books

Linda JohnsHow much about the book “Stories for Boys” did you know or understand when you first began writing it? What was revealed to you during the writing?

Greg MartinThe short answer about what I understood at the front end is “not much. “But I did know what I wanted. I wanted to understand my father better, to somehow get a handle on how this man I had known all of my life could have been successfully living a secret life without me ever having even a single notion. How did he-how does anyone-pull that off? I wanted to interrogate my own confusion, as well as my sense that the story I had always been telling myself about my childhood, now felt false. I suddenly felt like an unreliable narrator of my own life. Was I? I wanted to explore how the ground of my memory seemed to shift under my feet. I wanted to explore questions about secrecy and parenting. What do you tell children? How much? When? I didn’t have good answers to any of these questions, and I hoped that through the writing I would move from a state of confusion to a state of lesser confusion, that the writing would take me somewhere I needed to go. And I needed to go there whether I was going to write about it or not.

To read the entire interview, please go to the Seattle Public Library website.