Editor’s note: This week in “State of the Arts,” Keenan Walsh previewed a series of author readings starting on Sunday, June 30, at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier. Read more here.
The series’ headliner — who’ll speak at VCFA on July 2 — is novelist Richard Russo. Even if you haven’t read his work, you may know it as the source of two memorable showcases for the older Paul Newman: Nobody’s Fool and the miniseries Empire Falls.
The author’s latest work is a memoir. He has plenty to say about characters who surprise their authors, making a story up as you go, and his in-progress sequel to Nobody’s Fool. Here’s Walsh’s complete conversation with Russo, not all of which we had room to print.
SEVEN DAYS: I wanted to start by talking about your most recent work — your memoir, Elsewhere. In your short story “The Whore’s Child,” Sister Ursula is writing a memoir-type piece in a fiction-writing class. To be vague for those who haven’t read the story (but should), I’ll just say that she discovers there’s a fine line between fact and fiction; that sometimes we create fiction in our own retelling of the “facts.” In writing Elsewhere, which was your first memoir…
RICHARD RUSSO: And last! [Laughs.]
SD: [Laughs.] Was there a similarly surprising process of discovery for you as you wrote Elsewhere? Did you realize things that you wouldn’t have otherwise, had you not written it?
RR: I’m so happy that you picked up on that parallel, because my experience in writing this memoir was not unlike Sister Ursula’s. She discovers, in telling the story — and having other people respond to her telling the story — that of course her memory is flawed, and she’s forced to confront something about her life that I think she may have known some part of in the back of her mind, but very deep in her own need to believe something else. And I discovered in writing Elsewhere, not that there was any great secret, so much as the fact that I just didn’t really understand, until writing this book, some aspects of the story of my own life, and the story of my mother’s life.
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