Hawthorne Books

One of the biggest criticisms about your work is that it is gruelingly, at times overwhelmingly, dark. Why so sad?

When I first told people that Call Me Home was slated to be published, friends and acquaintances kept asking me, “Is it funny?”

“No,” I would say. “Not even a little bit. Not even for a second.”

This makes me laugh, but it’s true. I think I can be decently funny in person, on a good day, and I respect (and am fairly jealous of) anyone who can be funny on the page, but I’m not a humorous or light writer, often to a fault. André Aciman writes in Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, “What we reach for and what ultimately touches us is the radiance we’ve projected on things, not the things themselves — the envelope, not the letter, the wrapping, not the gift.” I’ve often been accused of misplaced radiance—of being drawn toward darkness, toward flawed characters. But I don’t think that’s it—I don’t think that I’m projecting radiance on to anyone; I think it’s there; I think of how achingly beautiful it is that each person in the world has their own set of dreams and needs and wants, and that’s what I wanted to do with the book. To show who these people are, individually, and then to show how their stories add up to a bigger story of their family, one that you can’t fully see from the inside, that is bigger than the sum of its parts. I think we have a responsibility to witness darkness and sorrow, to live alongside it and acknowledge how we are made by it, rather than pretending it away.

To read the entire interview, go to The Nervous Breakdown.