Hawthorne Books

At sixty-seven years old and living with AIDS, novelist Tom Spanbauer still teaches a weekly writer’s workshop called Dangerous Writing in the basement of his home in Portland, Oregon. On April 1st, 2014 Tom Spanbauer’s latest novel I Loved You More will be published by Hawthorne Books.

When I first sat down with Spanbauer, he had recently finished I Loved You More. The novel’s focus is Ben, an Idaho-raised writer living in New York City, and his friend Hank, a fellow Columbia student. Although Ben is gay and Hank is straight, they’re in love all the same. That is, until a woman comes between them. I Loved You More takes the reader through 23 years, four cities, and a tale of love, loss, illness, and friendship.

In the dining room of his home in southeast Portland, Spanbauer was dressed in a Columbia University zip-up sweater and wearing his classic black square-framed glasses. The dining room table was littered with students’ pages from his weekly workshop class, his small marks in the margin, and the signature heart on the back, but in the middle of the table was a stack of paper: the manuscript for I Loved You More, higher than all the rest.

NAILED MAGAZINETell me about your new book, I Loved You More.

TOM SPANBAUERThe thing that makes it really different from the other books is the narrator is not telling the story right after it’s over with. The last part of the story is being told in 2008 and the first part is 1985, so 23 years, and really there’s all that kind of comments that [the narrator Hank] can make about the 23 years. He can talk about time. He can talk about what he doesn’t remember. What he remembers now and how he doesn’t know if that’s really the case. But more than anything I can be in-scene with two characters talking, and I can stop and say look at us with our eighties hair. We didn’t know this, we didn’t know that, we didn’t know all this stuff. So it’s a whole other dimension.

NAILEDThat makes it pretty different from your other books that are more coming of age stories.

SPANBAUERThat very particular element, that fact that it’s told with all those years in-between, does make it sound very different. I really like that it gives me more. It doesn’t keep me so bound up in a voice. I can stop and go somewhere else and start commenting on shit. I like the way I feel released and opened up in a way. It’s not so confined. It’s scary because it’s new. I started writing [I Loved You More] in June of 2008. Three and a half years to write this size of a book is really great. There’s a beginning, middle and end. More than ever it’s a marketable piece. And you know, I have AIDS and had a stroke and I’m old. I’m sure they’re thinking the old fucker is going to die. So there it is. A finished product. It’s a powerful, I think a really powerful, new voice.

To read Colin Farstad’s entire interview, go to Nailed Magazine.