Wally Lamb: Loaded Questions with the bestselling author of "The Hour I First Believed" Part Two

The more I read over the transcript of the interview I conducted with Wally Lamb a week or so ago the more I realize what an interesting and geuinely pleasant individual he was. Having read both of his first two books, I Know This Much Is True and She's Come Undone, as a young adult not long after I realized the joys of reading books that weren't assigned, I would say I have an attachment to the style of Wally Lamb's writings. It was partly because Lamb's novels played such an important role in my foundation literary likes and dislikes that I was very nervous to talk with him and particularly hopeful that he was amiable and interesting. I think it becomes very clear in the second part of this interview that we had a good deal of fun talking. I know from reading countless Lamb interviews that some of the information he has shared in the second half of the the interview below is new and exclusive. He shares some very interesting coincidences where his characters are concerned, the very organic nature of his book's plots and finally the interesting way he begins looking for new material.

Read Part One of our Interview with Wally Lamb, here.

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Kelly: I also read in one of your previous interviews that often head over to the fiction floor of your library to write.

Wally Lamb: Yeah! I live at the back door of the University of Connecticut, in fact I taught there for awhile, but it's about a ten minute drive to get over there and a lot of She's Come Undone was written in long hand on the fourth floor of that library. Because of the way that I write, I have to sit down and discover what the story is, I am not one of these writers who can outline the whole thing and write toward a preconceived ending, I have to sit down and sort of find out what is going to happen. Very often, because that is my way of doing it, I get stuck and hit the wall. So if I am working in the library I can get up from the study carol where I am sitting and just sort of wander around and read the spines of the books, the titles and stuff, and lots of times I make discoveries that I would not have made had I not done that. Wandering in a library is definitely part of my technique.

Kelly: Right. One of the biggest discoveries that I have read about you making in the library was the one related to the Birdsey twins (from I Know This Much Is True).

Wally: Yeah that's right because I had an ancient myth and the troubled brother of the main character and I happened upon this book and it was by Claude Levi Strauss who was one of those guys who investigates myths. I opened the book and this xerox fell out of it, it was obvious that a student had been doing a paper or something and had xeroxed this article. I picked up the article and it said "Harelips and Twins" and suddenly it came to me. Oh my god, these guys are twins, they're identical twins and when I made that discovery that's when I could understand that character Dominic Birdsey and his anger and the fact that underneath his anger was this fear.

I had a similar thing with this novel, The Hour I First Believed. I was wandering again and I came upon a book called The Logic of the Labyrinth and I opened it up and I was reading about labyrinths, mythology and labyrinths in English gardens and all that kind of stuff. And then I read this thing about the irony of the maze and you're stuck in the middle of it and it is illogical, nonsensical and confusing but if you rise above it you can see that there is an order and there is a way out. So that became the metaphor of the book and I divided the novel into two parts. One is Butterfly is kind of an investigation of how chaos can screw up our lives and send us reeling in different directions that we hadn't planned on. Then part two, Mantis, is kind of like looking from above, down at the labyrinth and seeing that there is some sort of ordering principle to it all, there is a meaning to life whether it's spiritual or otherwise. So chaos and order, all part of this dichotomy.

Kelly: I think that's great. You've probably just inspired an entire generation of aspiring authors to go wandering around their local libraries.

Wally Lamb: [laughs] I just hope that when I gab on like this I'm not sounding like my own Spark Notes.

Kelly: [laughs] The other part of that question was whether or not you ever get recognized at the library.

Wally: Oh yeah, plenty of times. I tell you, I work in writer's groups and there's this one group -- people ask me "Where did you come up with that name Caelum?" and the character in the first draft that I wrote was name Milo Quirk and one day I was meeting with my writing group in a sandwich shop across from the university and this undergraduate comes up and says, "Excuse me for interrupting. Are you Wally Lamb?" I said "Yeah". And then he said "Oh, you named one of your characters after my sister." It turned out to be true, my wife is an elementary school teacher and she once had a student she liked and her name was Zahra and I liked that name so I named a Cocker Spaniel in She's Come Undone after her, Zahra. So this kid comes up to me and I am afraid he's going to be made because I named a Cocker Spaniel after his sister but he didn't. He smiled and said "Do you think you could name a character after me?" and I said "Well, I don't know, what's you name?" He told me his name was Caelum and he spelled it out for me and I said "Well, no promises." Then I went home and I was thinking it over -- Milo or Caelum and finally Caelum won out. So, not only did I name a character after him, I named the main character after him.

Kelly: That is amazing! You're going to have to call that family the next time you write a book to see if there are anymore siblings. [laughs]

Wally Lamb: Right. [laughs] Gotta keep it all equal.

Kelly: I thought it was really interesting that you placed the main character from The Hour I First Believed, the aforementioned Caelum Quirk, in the same class as Dominic and Thomas Birdsey. Can fans of I Know This Much Is True expect to see the paths of Caelum Quirk and the Birdsey twins cross?

Wally Lamb: Yeah. I'll tell you why I did that. First of all, I have created this town, they both have this fictional town as a setting, I call it Three Rivers, Connecticut, but it is sort of based on my home town and a couple of towns that I have lived in: Norwich, CT; New London, CT and Willamantic, CT where I have an office. It is a hybrid of three Connecticut working class towns. So I sort of figured that logically they are all living in a small town and it is credible that they might run into each other from time to time. So that's one of the reasons why I did that. The other reason is that I am really grateful to the people who have loved my work, people really seem to be invested in the characters, not only Thomas and Dominic but Delores from She's Come Undone, the first novel. So that's sort of my way of waving a hello and thanks to these people that have loved those characters. I am sort of giving the allusion that, okay, they are still out there, they are still struggling but doing okay.

Kelly: Would you ever return to any of the characters from your previous novels?

Wally Lamb: I did once, when I finish a novel it's not mine anymore. I let it go and it belongs to the readers, not me. But, I did go back to the characters from She's Come Undone when I was writing the screenplay for that novel. When you write screenplays there's a lot that you have cut out, you have to take a several hundred page novel and turn it into a one hundred and fifteen page script. A lot ends up on the cutting room floor. One of the things that was fun for me was that as I cut out I created new scenes for those characters. So, that's the only time I have ever gone back. I don't know what's around the corner for me. I do really like this fictional town so there may be minor characters that I can begin to make major characters -- I'm not sure.

Kelly: Interesting. Do you know that status of the She's Come Undone movie, has it been optioned or whatever those words are for a movie that's in the beginning process?

Wally Lamb: Both She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True both started out as
options and then both were bought by movie studios. She's Come Undone is with Warner Brothers and I Know This Much Is True is with 20th Century Fox. It is a long, long process development stuff. The projects heat up and then cool down, major stars have been attached to them and then they detach. For She's Come Undone Reese Witherspoon was going to produce and star in it. Will Smith was very interested for awhile in playing the twins in I Know This Much Is True. But what happens, because Hollywood is more about money than art, when some of these major stars express interest everyone holds their breath but the problem is that they are being offered not just your project but another five hundred projects. So, both projects stalled when they were interested so they decided to go elsewhere. They are still viable projects but a lot of years have gone by and I don't know if they will ever be made. One of the things you learn to do is write your name on the back of the check and realize that it's beyond your control.

Kelly: And never look back. [laughs]

Wally: [laughs]

Kelly: I know that this last novel too you quite awhile.

Wally: It did. [laughs]

Kelly: You were a few years past your deadline.

Wally: Yeah, like double past. I am always nervous when I have to talk to journalists who have to make their deadline because fiction writers, you know, as long as your publisher is willing to hang in there with you you can take the time you need to develop. The unfortunate thing is that it does take me a long time to come up with these stories but ultimately I needed that much time and I needed -- I was reacting to a lot of things that were happening in our country and in our world and that sort of got woven into the story. It took what it took. But thankfully Harper Collins was patient.

Kelly: I read a quote from you that you said you could have signed a three or four book deal but you weren't interested in mortgaging the rest of your life.

Wally: Right. I want to take it one at a time because I don't know how many stories I have in me. Each one has been more difficult to write than the one before it and I don't want to promise that I am going to create four more books and then decide that I only want to write two more. I am taking it slowly.

Kelly: We'll be interviewing the author of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle later this week . . .

Wally: Oh yeah! Have you read that book?

Kelly: Well, I -- this is such a sad story. The publisher was nice enough to send a copy of the book to me and I went on vacation to Hawaii. I was so excited that I had it and so I packed along with me and I left it in my hotel room. So . . .

Wally: You sound like me.

Kelly: I know, I wasn't joking earlier about losing things while traveling. I am just going to have to swallow my pride and go and buy a copy just like everyone else. [laughs] But, I am wondering, looking back what sort of advice you would give to a fairly new novelist who has been selected for such an honor.

Wally: Are you talking about the Oprah Book Club?

Kelly: Yeah.

Wally: Well, I would say it's a real exciting, thrilling roller coaster ride. Enjoy the dips and the turns around corners and then when the ride is over get off the roller coaster and start again, humbly. You know, there's nothing more humbling than the blank page. I think it is crucial that you write the story for yourself and don't worry about whatever the audience is going to be that eventually reads it.

Kelly: That's good advice. I know this is probably the last question you want to answer while celebrating the release of your new book but are you already working on something else?

Wally: I am still officially in recovery.

Kelly: I bet.

Wally: But, I do have a notebook that I carry around with me wherever I go. I've got my radar up, picture a satellite disk on top of my head and it is magnetized towards certain subjects. I have list of things that I want to start investigating. Everything from Lou Gehrig's to P.T. Barnum, Great Blue herons. I have a couple of myths that I am reading and considering for that sort of backdrop or scaffolding. So, that's where I am now, sort of generating material and seeing what is going to begin to vibrate for me.

Kelly: That's kind of exciting. It is exciting as a reader to think that things come together so organically, that you haven't sat down with a formula -- that things are fluid to change, right?

Wally: Definitely, yeah. A lot of people ask me what author I read but probably a better question is what musicians am I listening to and also who are the painters that I like, who are the artists and so forth. One of my favorite artists is René MaGritte who sort of puts these two -- he's kind of a surrealist and he puts two things together that don't necessarily make sense but create some kind of weird and interesting energy. So, that's what I do too. I'll take something like Lou Gehrig's and the Great Blue heron and and I'll put them next to each other and see if there's an electric charge that goes back and forth between them and that's sometimes how stories begin for me.

Kelly: That is really interesting. Well, I thank you very much participating.

Wally: You're welcome!

Interview with Wally Lamb, bestselling author of The Hour I First Believed, She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True

Author Interview: Loaded Questions with bestselling author Wally Lamb




Its 4:00 am the day before Thanksgiving. Everyone else who has gathered to celebrate the holiday the next day has already gone to sleep but I've been sitting up for hours trying to will myself to put Wally Lamb's latest novel, The Hour I First Believed, down. I hadn't intended this, was going to bed at 11 pm when I suddenly remembered that the book had arrived a few days earlier and that I had packed it in my bag. Just to help me fall asleep, I think, cracking the book open.

Four hours later the sun is beginning to rise and I am sitting in the exact same spot on top of the covers, the bedroom light on. I haven't slept and when I say that I don't mean that I have tried to lay down but just haven't been able to sleep, I mean quite literally -- my eyes never closed.

It had become my ritual to check Amazon every few months for any sign of a Wally Lamb release on the horizon. I didn't know that he'd been working on a book since 1999, fresh off of a public sensation that was the result of one of his novels, I Know This Much Is True, being picked as an Oprah Book Club book for the second time in his short career. The fact that it had taken him so long, that he had been years late on his deadline, meant nothing to me when I first saw the new title pop up in the search window. From that moment on I was ready to be swept up by what has become Wally Lamb's style: a painfully true novel that looks at the lives of real people in crisis, coping or not.

The Hour I First Believed is great novel, worth wait -- maybe even enriched by the wait. The main character, Caelum Quirk, is a middle-aged teacher on his third marriage who moves to Littleton, Colorado, where he gets a job at Columbine, to escape an embrassing situation and so that his wife, Maureen who works at Columbine as a nurse, can be closer to a father she'd never been able to connect with. There may be a certain reaction to finding out that the novel is, partly, based upon the events that took place at Columbine High School in 1999 but prospective readers should know that that horrific occurrence is not dramatized in the novel, not justified, recreated or glorified. Lamb instead considers the violence that took place at Columbine and uses his characters Caelum and Maureen Quirk to look at what happens after such a traumatic event, whether memories of such an event ever fade. The novel consists of a number of characters experiencing crisis and hardship and how each of them responds in their own way. I think you will see from the interview below and in the second part to be published tomorrow that Wally Lamb is an author that has a great deal of emotion and feeling for those involved in school violence and it occurred to me, while talking with him, that it was that emotion and connection that lead Lamb to give The Hour I First Believed the proper time and attention.

Despite my nervousness Wally Lamb was easy to chat with, the interview quickly taking the form of a conversation. He discusses his writing habits, his experiences with the Oprah Book Club and the appearance of Thomas and Dominic Birdsey (two integral characters from Lamb's bestselling I Know This Much Is True) in his new novel.

I look forward to sharing this interview with Loaded Question readers, literature junkies and Wally Lamb fans more than any interview we have done in the past. Please feel free to leave comments about your reaction to this interview, your feelings about the novel, etc.

Amazon is currently featuring The Hour I First Believed for 40% off, click here for more details.


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Kelly Hewitt: I know that you have just returned from a book tour for The Hour I First Believed, how has that been going?

Wally Lamb: Yeah, I actually just got back from the first leg of the tour, I go back on the road on Saturday or Sunday. It was really a lot of fun, exhausting of course but I met some great people and had some really nice audiences. When I was in Minneapolis I went and was interviewed at the Fitzgerald Theater which is where they do the Prairie Home Companion so I got to sign the wall there, that kind of thing. The signings have gone well, so yeah, I have had a really good time. My only problem was that my last gig was in Fargo, North Dakota and at that point I was so tired that I fell asleep at the gate and jumped onto the plane at the last minute and left my laptop behind in North Dakota.

Kelly: Oh no!

Wally Lamb: Other than that things have been going well. We did a signing down in New Orleans, a reading and a signing and two of my sons are down there teaching in the inner city and so I had a nice reunion with them and that was great too.

Kelly: Very good. You're a trooper, I sometimes take one trip and sometimes lose things and fall asleep at gates. I can't imagine traveling that long.

Wally: [laughs] After awhile you start to pick up a rhythm and of course the book company hires these media escorts that meet you at the airplane so they drive you around from place to place, wherever you need to be, to the interviews and stuff so that stress is taken away from you. So it's all good.

Kelly: I was interested in preparing to talk to you that you often read classic novels and ancient works to familiarize yourself with the kind of stories that have lasted over time and that people really connect to.

Wally: Yeah mythology. I had very good advice early on. I had a wonderful writing teacher named Gladys Swan who told me, you know, you're never really going to tell an original story because all of the stories that people have needed, sort of like the real humane and human stories that reveal human behavior and human values, they are already out there. So the best you can do is to put your spin on that. I am sure I looked at her kind of doppily and didn't know what she was talking about but she said to go and read some ancient myths, that's what you need to do. Those are the stories that have lasted longer than any of the others. I began to do that and I discovered people like Claude Levi Strauss and Joseph Campbell and those people who have studied how the myths of a lot of different cultures are very similar to one another. So, consequently, for each of three novels I have a myth or, in the case of this novel a couple of myths, that form the spine of the contemporary story that I am telling. Now, as a reader you don't need to know that, those stories are just sort of a guidepost for me.

Kelly: Well that was part of my next question, is there a particular story or myth that you read in preparation for The Hour I First Believed?

Wally: Yeah, the story – you know I started investigating this Columbine stuff, I kind of fell into it accidentally, actually, when I got on the Internet this tidal wave of stuff about Columbine kind of both interested and disturbed me. And so the myth that was sort of used as the backbone was the myth of Theseus who goes into the labyrinth, he's got to confront the monster in the middle which is the Minotaur. That began to really resonate and in a sense both my character Caelum and I kind of took on what I came to see as the two-headed monster of Dylan Kelbold and Eric Harris. It was important for me to deal with the actual rather than to fictionalize a Columbine-like setting.

Kelly: As a reader I am glad that you handled it that way.

Wally: Oh, really?

Kelly: Yeah, it was a real event and this way it forces the reader and you the author to deal with the real world seriousness of the events. It doesn't need to be fiction, right? Because it was such an important event that we shouldn't be allowed to escape from.

Wally: I think we still need to keep examining that, you know? I was a little bit nervous about how people who were actually involved at the high school that day or who lived in Littleton, how they were going to react to it and I guess I will probably know when I go back out on the tour. One of my first stops will be in Colorado. But, I felt kind of validated by the people I have met in other cities who had a Littleton connection or in a couple of cases people who are now in their twenties who were students at the time at Columbine. I felt very reassured that they were saying that they were glad that I have taken up this subject matter because they don't want the people of Columbine to be forgotten. There have been so many subsequent school shootings that, I think we need to keep looking at this thing.

Kelly: The book does deal with some pretty heavy material with the events of Columbine and the effect of tragic events on the people who live through them. I wonder, as a school teacher of twenty-five years were you ever afraid of school violence? Was that something that occurred to you?

Wally: Well, certainly nothing of that scope. I remember one time fairly early on in my teaching career, it was after school. One kid was bullying and chasing after another kid and I stopped them both in the hallway and I said to the kid who was sorta being chased, I said “What's the matter?” and he said “He's got my gun!” and I thought there was some kind of kidding or that he was exagerating but low and behold the other kid handed over his pistol and that's probably the closest I came to it. There was no danger. There was no gun fire. But, you know, it could happen and I reacted to Columbine not just as a teacher who could pretty much emphasize with what it might be like but also as a father too. You have to have great empathy for those parents of those families.

Kelly: Right. I read in another interview that you knew some people or, some people who knew people who had been involved in a school attack first hand and that you had talked to...

Wally: Yeah, one in particular and that was the one in Paducah, Kentucky and that was actually before Columbine and it was my cousin's daughters who were at that high school and they knew the older sister of the shooter and I would think about her and worry about her and wonder, you know, how she was doing. And Klebold and Harris they both have older siblings, each of them had an older brother who maybe a couple years earlier who had gone through Columbine High School and I worry about those kids too. I mean certainly there's the victims and their families but when your siblings became infamous your family name is in the news in this horrible way. What happens to these collaterally damaged people? That was kind of my entry into it.

Kelly: That's interesting, because we often don't here a lot about the siblings and family members.

Wally: Right and I can understand why they would want to go underground. I think I feel just as much empathy towards the Klebold and Harris families as I do the victim's family because, you know, they are victimized too and they will certainly never get over it. Also, I think too that my work with the women at the Connecticut Maximum Security Prison, which started at the same time I started the novel, that certainly fed into my understanding of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder because many of the women I work with suffer from that. (Interviewer's note: It is while working with this prison that Lamb edited two collections of stories written by his inmate students: Couldn't Keep It To Myself and I'll Fly Away) Some of them have done these terrible things and have had pretty traumatic things done to them particularly in their childhood. It kind of makes you connect the dots and look at the bigger picture. PTSD certainly comes into play when a lot of the soldiers come back from Iraq and Afghanistan and also the people who lived through Katrina.

I have two sons who are teaching down in New Orleans and one of them was there teaching school in the 9th Ward when Katrina happened and so he had to evacuate and he taught in Houston for a year and he was working with 6th graders and many of them have suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome from Katrina.

Kelly: So both of your sons became teachers?

Wally: Yeah, they both entered the Teach America program and our older boy now is a principal, he's only twenty-seven, but he's a principal at one of the charter schools that have sort of blossomed in the wake of Katrina. Our younger son teaches writing down there at a school called The Langston Hughes Academy. [laughs] There are both charter schools. The one benefit that has come out of Katrina is – you know it was such a broken and chaotic school system down there in New Orleans and now it is being replaced to a larger extent by these charters and are really doing great things for the kids now.

Kelly: After your novel She's Come Undone was selected as an Oprah Book Club choice and became very popular there were a lot of readers who registered some surprise that a man had written a female character with such skill ...

Wally: Oh yeah. That's still one of the questions that I get a lot in readings and stuff.

Kelly: Well, it's been sixteen years since the book has been published and I guess maybe you answered my question which was, do you think that things have changed that a novel like She's Come Undone written from a female prospective by a male author would still be such a surprise to readers?

Wally: I don't know, I think it certainly has been more common for female writers to write male characters than the opposite. But, yeah I think people would still stand up and take notice. I tell you, I have never been one to prescribe to this theory that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. I think if you scratch the surface we're more alike than different. Let's face it, we all come from male and female – that's how we're created. So, yeah to some extent I think that it is marketable to sort of focus on how different guys are from women. But I've just never. . . I guess if men are from Mars and women are from Venus I am just an intergalactic traveler. [laughs]

Stay tuned for part two of our exclusive interview with Wally Lamb tomorrow. Tomorrow Wally and I chat talk about where he came up with the name Caelum Quirk, his writing rituals and the occasional appearance of Thomas and Dominic Birdsey, well known characters from I Know This Much Is True, in his new novel.