Q&A with Stefan Merrill Block

Did your research for the book come from any personal experience or was it purely empirical?

I checked a few facts as I wrote to make sure my basic information was correct, but mostly whatever research made it into the book is simply the research that at some point, well before writing the novel, I had felt compelled to read. When I was younger, I thought (like Seth) that I would become a scientist, and much of this moribund aspiration was focused on studying what most haunted my family, our genetic legacy of Alzheimer's Disease. After quitting the lab, I continued to read a lot of science, much of it out of simple curiosity, but each time I spot the word "Alzheimer's" in a news story, I read it carefully, hoping it will provide a new hope or understanding for my family. Science is a major part of how I think, and so when I'm writing fiction, I often give it a similar importance to history or setting. As much as I'm fascinated by what science can tell us, I'm equally fascinated by what it can't, the vast complex human truths that science only outlines, leaving us to fill in the void with our memory, empathy, and imagination.

Did you feel emotionally attached to any of the characters?

Yes! But one of the biggest surprises to me in writing my first book was that my relationship with my characters turned out to be more complicated than I had imagined. I had often read other writers describing their characters like close friends, entities that were distinctly outside of them, almost other people in the room. I hope this isn't a sign of dreadful egocentricity, but I feel that I experience my characters not as entirely separate from me, but as different aspects of me. Each character feels like an expression for a different set of my fears and hopes, experiments in other ways I could have been or could still be. And so their fates feel deeply personal, as they are, in ways, my own.

Which character did you prefer creating - Abel or Seth?

I don't know that I felt a preference, but I can say that Abel came to me first, and that Seth came later, that Abel was necessary first, in order to create Seth. This was a real revelation for me, as a first-time novelist. It might seem that Seth, who bears so much resemblance to me at fifteen, would allow the truer, fuller expression of my internal life, but somehow it was Abel, an old man and a hunchback, through whom I could articulate more directly what I felt.

How long did it take you to write?

It's difficult to measure. From one perspective, the writing took place over the course of five years, as I wrote a first draft of the Isidora fables, never intending them to be a part of a book, when I was nineteen. But I did not begin writing something that was identifiably this book until I was 23, while working as a cameraman in India. From my earliest attempts at beginning the book to its completion was a period of about two years. But I kept essentially nothing from the first nine or so months of writing, and I spent the last year editing and revising. So the actual writing of the rough draft of the book that now exists took about three months of that five year period.

Are you writing anything else? If so, when is your next book due and what's it about?

Of course it could change, but right now the book is a sort of half-fiction about time my grandfather spent at the famous McLean Mental Hospital in the 1960s. While my grandfather was there, McLean housed many of the "mad" poets of the new "confessional" style: Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath. My grandfather also wrote while he was hospitalized there. But he died somewhat mysteriously in 1968, and, in the mid '80s, my grandmother burned most of his writings. So the book is my attempt to recreate his burned writings, and really to try to understand this person who I never met but who left such deep scars on my family's history. Most of the book, I think, will be my fictional imagination of his hospitalization and his writing, with a few short non-fiction vignettes about his legacy and the ways my family has tried to explain him. Or, at least, that's what makes sense for now. I've told my agent to expect a rough draft this May (2009), and it looks like I just might make it.

Who is your favourite author and is your writing style similar to theirs?

I don't think I can answer this question! I have a bad tendency, both in my writing and in my personal life, to love most passionately that which is in front of me. Right now, I believe that Vladimir Nabokov is the greatest author I've ever read, but I know I've felt that way about others before. I also cannot say if my style is similar to others - I can't have that kind of objectivity on my own writing -- but I can say that sometimes I read something from another author and experience a moment of startling recognition, an expression of something privately felt that another has already put into words. I don't know if this means that I would appear to have a similar style to them, but I can remember often having this experience while reading Michael Cunningham, Michael Chabon, Italo Calvino, Jeffrey Eugenides, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alice Munro and Adam Haslett.

Where is your favourite place to write?

Unfortunately, my favourite place and the place I write best are vastly different. I would prefer to write someplace scenic and remote, in a cabin on a mountainside or in a bungalow perched atop a New England cliff. But I seem to write best in my dim, fluorescent-lit kitchen in Brooklyn, amid a graveyard of empty coffee cups, sitting on a ten dollar plastic chair.

Do you prefer the American or UK jacket for the book?

Oh, I bet I'll get in trouble for this one! The truth is that while I find the American jacket appealing, intriguing, and strange in a good way, I feel that the UK paperback jacket is a nearly perfect visual expression of the book, remarkably close to the jacket I would sometimes imagine while writing.

Our questions were asked by Book Circle Panelists Joyce Hyde and Zoey Totty.