Tom Spanbauer Author of I Loved You More Interviewed by Christopher Carbone on April 3, 2014 for Kirkus
Spanning two decades and a lifetime’s worth of heartache, Tom Spanbauer’s fifth novel, I Loved You More, reckons with the complex truths of adulthood: love, illness, loss, betrayal and friendship. It’s also an honest depiction of how men—gay and straight—treat other men.
The novel follows the interconnected lives of three people: Ben Gruenwald, a gay man who is sometimes in relationships with women and narrates the story; Hank Christian, a straight guy who forges a bond with Ben after taking a writing class with him at Columbia University; and Ruth Dearden, a student of Ben’s who ends up nursing him back to health after he’s diagnosed as being HIV positive. The fireworks that ensue between these strong-willed people over the course of book—not to mention the raw psychic scars and corrosive feelings that are ever-prevalent—are gripping.
“It always starts for me with something that’s troubling inside me, something that is wrong or there’s some kind of place inside of me that’s sore,” Spanbauer says about the inspiration for his fiction. He lives in Portland, Ore., where he teaches a weekly Dangerous Writing course. “So I start going to that place and start noodling around. What happened was a friend of mine died and I hadn’t spoken to him for seven years and I started trying to write—I thought I knew all about what had happened between us, but I didn’t know.”
To read the entire article, go to Kirkus.