The Fine Print; Program 02 33 Guest Tony Earley Book Somehow Form A Family

from national public radio this is the fine print and exploration and celebration of the written word idea better than two years ago writer tony only found out what it's like to suddenly being thrown into the wind line the reason publication of his first novel gm the boy this deceptively simple book was universally praised by everyone and everything from the new york times book review for front page and les to junior high english classes all over the country needless to say it was a bestseller tiny follow that the next year with a book of essays titled somehow form a family that book has just come out in paperback with excerpts from some of the music you see according to the charlotte observer somehow former family is every bit as poignant funny and beautifully

rendered as his fiction and the houston chronicle states there's a lot of mark twain antonio the norm eisen with heart and inside in the service of a great storyteller like plane early held for three months somehow for the family looks at the events that shape to know is why some of the real some of them imagined and not a few seeing on television it's an amazing journey and one will be talking about on today's program hope you can join us personnel as scientists there is a type of contract between the author and reader where it was licensed two we're really look into your heart your soul your family your purse to life what you think what you feel is it hard to summon a contract i think it's fairly easy

to sign the content of that was difficult was doing it well mean you can go in the other direction until way too much hair reiter a complete naval gazing these are the nobodies as did all except yourself so it is difficult times and how much to tell without telling too much how did the family members you've written about feel about what you've written about them my mother really didn't want me to publish this book particularly title essay pupil although all maternal tricks that kardashian me and not doing in that you only put a disclaimer art historians say that said players mother won't you know this job that wasn't as bad as this essay says so she was unhappy with my dad just get with them by not reading it it was upset because she was upset and the rest of them was very quiet about it they'll talk about my other books good this week a magnet does that make a ripple in the bondage spitting and i couldn't have him now as a granny early he's still

alive monogram of the lead that are still alive and the way that you don't write much about her grillo better known was he never tells me a story with the first thing you don't you put this in a book ever been adolescent telling a wannabe writer when i grow up they're only buys me was well don't tell everything you know she thinks that tell everything and then let's talk about that first to say that before we do in your introduction you bring up something that i don't think there's a person in this audience who has not experienced this him or herself and that's an absolutely extraordinarily vivid memory of some pivotal point in your life and you know everything about it down to the last detail and then somebody comes along and says all it was a like that and shows you what is fairly hard to argue with the fact that you can't go into because it's become a part of fabric of your life i really came to understand how much mere imagination the same thing when

i was compelled to set us a richly harper's and i write about how the moon was full light of the moon landing and fact checker column episode know wasn't for it was out waxing crescent and i just got furious because i knew she was absolutely wrong or how dare harper's hire an inept fact checker so i go in the internet and look at myself and she was right it was selection cuz i'm yet i had this is completely vivid memory of the movie and full on that night and that's when i and i realized that really what we remember something in a way we're actually making up in our heads at the act of remembering is an act of imagine as does not like we can plug in a video cassette and watch over over never changes it changes as we remember it depending on why were marion what we will become of of that ruling and so it changes so much over time that eventually the solace that may be what actually happened was the remembrances this re creation i've done that with family stories that i heard people telling about me a quick example

our story had a terrible case of tonsil linus and we were living in ohio at the time my mother did not trust ohio doctors to take my tonsils out she was waiting until she could bring me back to tennessee so i had to get shots every week to help with the town's allies and my mother said to me at one point about how much i hated those shots and how hard it was to get me to go to the doctor and as a child somehow or another i concocted this while story of nurse is chasing me all over the doctor's office dionne down hallways through room to try to catch me give me a shiny became totally real to me and years later i hadn't mentioned it to my mother and she looked at me and just started laughing and said that never happened and i thought well you know you remember the us air and occasionally will be coming down and a compulsive storyteller and taste better on the way home after one of the performances

she'll say you know that's not the way it happened if i'd made the sheep trial often say yeah but just the way it should have happened because it makes a better story in your store is a better story running screaming down down the hallway without jesus poor wilson evelyn talbott yeah you'd never done an apartment oh well plessy cashed in on the relic and in your case that big fold know you know cast this warm glow on you and your sister and your father in the backyard gazing up as you said we couldn't see the astronauts but we could see the man in the moon in the moonlight shown on your sister's hair it's about her fictional story when the mirrors for all in this essay somehow for a family which are mother and will go ahead and give a disclaimer hear toby's mother does not want you to read this story ladies and gentlemen you'd wrap so much of your lives around the television shows i think people in our generation a lot of our lives as children this was before the

psychologist and psychologist or sign you're killing kids imagination you know kids should be watching all image tv we were parked in front of a television set a lot and the show's train in some ways to define our lives by looking at what was going on in our families as opposed to beaver and father knows best the brady bunch i'm all those other shows that were on television that bore no resemblance whatsoever to reality nasa television was really a fierce family member russets are now return on that three thirty we got home from school and it would stay on tiller but we did it in thirty or eleven it was always on and i can remember it so watching these shows and really forming my view of the outside world by someone a song that shows you know what i knew about wallsend jesus on adam twelve and dragnet and the beverly hillbillies and when you write a book and then a

book and then iran what is the beguiling i went in and nothing to do with the real world same thing about new york or later when i got to visit these places i saw how fractured a view of the world that does create an actor the rapunzel nothing at all like there could trade on television and it had to adjust and dolan sort of toss out that you were john reid i created as a child it was incorrect the death of your sister shelling is a thread that runs intermittently throughout all these essays and i think when you read them as a collection like this and by the way my congratulations on making these essays into a collection and i think it's one of this collection of essays i've ever read thank you the death of his sister the death of her brother the impact on the one who's left behind can even be chartered there's so many different layers and gradations to it but it was something i dont think you still lay down and make peace with heavy snow i i'm sure that i have i haven't and i am in the essays i was only able to

approach or obliquely and never say they're incomplete essay about the death of my sister because i certainly don't understand it and you know i don't guilty about it now exists or standing guard roddy survivor guilt but i'm sure that i became the artist ida came in probably no small measure because of her debt so on some level think gosh and benefiting because the sister died and then that really seems wrong and i think writers course too much anyway that's why i come at it right now well i hope that your wonderful lives sarah wynne her level headed is trying to disabuse you of that notion you are not benefiting from your sister's death well if i said that a ladder falls sergey rich and no no disabuse me of that but we're going to talk about some more of these essays i know when you wrote many of them it was a

very tough time in your life you were working on the book that eventually became jim the boy or not working or not working on it as the cases which of course has just received shu huge critical acclaim and an idea to meet someone who's read it who has loved it and obviously i've met a lot of people who have read the book but yeah you were suffering from writer's block you were suffering from a number of personal anxieties and problems and so you turned to the essay form why this particular form what kind of release to dig in here i guess i had a couple motivations by me the most literal motivation was that i was recently married and was trying to make a living as a writer and wrote these specifically with the idea of selling and to magazines and then later collecting them but simultaneously alice going to prevent spell a clinical depression and down inside that hold the only thing i can really think about

was myself and how bad i felt so it turns out the one thing i could write when i was at the press where these essays trying to figure out how i got into this mess so yeah that's what i came out to adam was it helpful process very well so here i mean a lawless people not a visiting or that he writes as therapy but i do think i've read some person understanding in their writing process that'd been helpful how is truly fascinated by what sets off a personal essay on a memoir what sorts of things trigger and then held a person we use them through in the essay hallway to me is a wonderful example of that you basically he trains for us much of your family history by talking about the hallway in your grandparents' house that actually started as anna simon appear reasonable call home americans for rooms of their own in weeks here's a book <unk>

riders detroit about different of last analysis starting out in because i was a starting out all the really cool room said had they had had been assigned to more prominent riders in the living room an image that i'm just one of the aisle and being flung around the total of live with unity on the hallway or the family room i'd never have and they're indicted know could always off i was given a metaphor to start with and this is how i must set in but romney's didn't feel a different to me the writing short stories because the material was there as it is in fiction and maoist are writing lots of sound and metaphorical vehicle allowed me away into it he gave me an excuse dr that provided the start all of them have either in our conversation with tony irving author of a short story

collection titled here we are in paradise the novel jim the boy and now a collection of essays titled somehow former family will resume after this brief time out i hope you can continue to check out the fine print support for the fine print comes from real estate brokers helen colter and shane smith of sharon munford and associates entrusted to sell the most cherished homes in nashville on the wealth at jane and helen realtors dot com many people have written memoirs that i've talked to have said that once they started writing about themself and levinson their lives that it was much like a time machine and they would remember things i had forgotten for years it seemed to bring back a lot of things to be thinking about them and writing about them that that happened for you yes but

also because of the movie as it also learned pretty quick and cannot always trust those memories on the yemeni i would or i think i had remembered in years and sometimes i was pleasant sometimes i was unpleasant you write about the difficult things in your life but i found that in many of these essays you also it may be an artist a little twisted but to me they're also seems a nice note of hold org sanity or something that comes in that keeps it from being on relieved gm so depressed in life is awful and that that special the one i think about especially is titled away worn path you were contemplating suicide you're in college and you had what would be termed a conversation with god encounter with god or could be termed a psychotic and related right but at the end you mention it starts off with the fact that you have been asked of the godfather to the daughter of friends of yours and you wonder what kind of godfather you're my aching that reminds you this we go

through that botanically and you he said whoa what should i tell her and you come up with all kinds of great advice none of which is terribly profound alicia really look at like don't drink beer in front of boys when you're old enough and things like that in the end to me that put such a grace note on then say otherwise i probably caught up in the mill than i am said tell you just don't feel it's why do you oh my god you know but no it puts a grey starred in there that mixes tango play if you stick it out if you work it out if you do the best you can then you might be okay what i've come doesn't last few years that until the same story over again that is how does a person live in a world is completely different than the one they were born into and as one make themselves up as they go along in this theme actually i come back to them again yemen again think that archerd talking about is that it did come out the other side of the troubles ahead in childhood and in the depression

had is as a grown man in my life is better now than it's ever been and it's continuing to improve and some love these essays were written with that realization in in mind that there has been a better day and based on that there will likely be another one you write in your introduction that the choir gene is the essay in here that you think is closest to the true essay form which in many ways means less of you is in this then more observation tell people what the queer genius i really understood this one because i you still have family who use these wonderful old terms to describe things to me it's such a colorful rich delightful way of hearing someone talk it bothers me to think there were possibly losing the genesis of acquired gene was after was grown out of graduate school i realized looking back end is still spent on the famine we still use a lot of words that were new english

words nothing now are probably largely restricted to the appalachians tom innkeeper use them anymore and i began to speculate on them while palin decide it was that words can be a typo gene to rich history and identity is passed down the fact that my family still uses the word choir meaning your author eccentric is indicative of a of a certain share history with the greater group that i did that were still exist force tells us who we are in a way that other words don't want the richness of some of these words and thinking about where they came from i had a great cousins and i'd never met although i'd heard about her show lemons all my life and ten years ago i guess my mother my sister and i went to visit him and herschel's known threat the family is a great storyteller and he started telling this wonderful story online great grandfather about the time he tried to signal a dead cow as a live cow and the cows being delivered to the farmer who's going to

buy it and all of a sudden just fell over dead and farmer said why this cows dead end and my great grandfather said no cows not dead she's just sold everett turns sold before but i didn't have to have it explained to me she's just a balky she's not cooperating she's just salt and i think that was a small epiphany for me because i thought gosh you know that's such a great image i can see the two of them standing on this dead cow arguing about whether or not she's dead or jazz soul because of you were disease for propounding you know i give one rubbers discipline me and i would start about there was an adult you saw love song love is also an awesome does replace daley's there yet to pass and saw not a lot of uniformity and expressive and colorful the language is an icon in the family of your eating daring your particular grab something awful somebody else's plate that's a value a drawback another

drawback and go oh i want to go into somebody comes to visit and they are staying and staying and staying in your eyes getting heavier and heavier and you think of while they go home instead of being rude and saying you've got to go home now and says he put on a big ol smile you give them a hug and say ooh lord how do you want to stay to lowell i'm just take too long you know nicer the fact that i am i wrote this essay also at a point i mean it's nostalgia i think isn't contemporary construction we can be discounted because we're just out there because we can be you know i don't think it gets a lecture that people in the past had so i cannot get all all moony out about this pastoral pass and they're really got to participate and drought always remember them and this language was most of tapering appalachian to our forebears were probably and did they do

it for starving to death inside to romanticize it too much because i think his doubters is a luxury and one that shall be used sparingly the fact that their words down of languages that's just the way languages are has been a constant process ever since people first began speaking so it's not new and i think it's only recently that we started to feel badly about this natural process i think also too goodness delta can come from the fact that you and i'm at a lot of other people whose parents or grandparents use these words commonly we've learned other words that mean the same thing and allow us to slip everest leslie and out of big city society and so we don't have to feel less than people who didn't speak better than to use the phrase our weekly or zell it's said you know kind of are fair based in the cafe says it made

so my cultural background or lower class background does that is through language you learn to pass in a different culture by learning to speak like their culture and forty the cotton and that produce me the language other cultures as oregon retake is the official language of stupidity in america while the people speaking a line is the best regarded certainly aren't stupid an outsider hearing him speak that language will make assumptions about their intelligence or little education just isn't true figuring that in the backyard if they have one they have a seat man pond and what are some of those other awful things legacy of the beverly hillbillies and he harks all i think the beverly hillbillies and and he hauled probably did more to destroy a traditional scots irish cultural thing i can think of the cars that just reinforces ideas that people who talk like this had to be stupid and once people who talk like that relies what this sort of culture could sense was to stop talking like that certainly ted you know there's wasn't a great deal of difference between the way i talked with

john ways that our courtship of the talk on the beverly hillbillies what side our legacy i was being perceived by outsiders i very quickly learned is the condition away i tell you most humorous essay in this entire collection is toward of facts and understand turnover unicef storyteller she would let listeners that hole what that particular essay is about several years ago i was brian one day on our radio ad for a contest of course what was pondering that course led a chartered a concorde was gone said the speed record for some oral certain allegation of earth man i wish i can get on their plan relies on herbal chance to win the contest the government when i worked as a magazine journalist and i can get on an airplane suck up our prison camp is the idea and i said sure go for his iconic or sly and said i write for harper's magazine getting on airplane next thing i knew osama concord flying around the world and we own would completely around the world and i'm thirty one hours and did set a record in only astronaut sit there on their aggression in a place

at the same time it was a romantic trip oh it was it was thirty one hours inside a very small airplane with a bunch of people got drunk and all of them galloway feet down we got that means they all our men are traveling the concord setting speed record in and we were in there planting and gas these people's voices airplane woodland only one point i though the woman who sat next to huge threat to flood another reporter then the body odor is floating up between the two cheers and she looks at you and says is that you or is that any of your reply is i don't know if it was if it was me and i would just be humiliated and if it was heroin was a buyer anymore side i just adore know i just assumed that it was the gas across the aisle it's also such an interesting little microcosm of the world i mean every time you get on an airplane you're with a group of people nine percent of time you would never choose to invite to your house

to spend any amount of time in such close quarters with but you're given a choice and so all you can really do is sit back and observe and i make the best of the situation that they're in his artificial communities as you say we're we might never choose to them to protest the bed and that was it that was certainly given up the island but has a bed in it again because most people on the part the point i was in were marketing guys who've helped organize the trip and my first suspicion that flight is nobody is more obnoxious than a drunken marketing person oh i can't get you in here without asking what life has been like post jim the boy and the wonderful response that has gotten from critics and from readers has it changed your life has it it has been denied anyway that i anticipated a certain you wouldn't give any of it

back and have enjoyed ever made in the recognition and i've happily spend the money but the same time life got very noisy i hadn't anticipated that incentive only recently have i started writing again so for two years i became a person who sold books which is an entire never no more and somebody writes books became one it's called us smiling public man and it's only just now started to come down nothing to quiet enough or i can go back to work course all this noise was gone i was looking for today we would acquire a gay man is getting quiet again after and think people are going to give you i am a need to write another book side and trying terror had had it both ways never happy i guess is the bottom line i still plan to make a film legend the boys hallmark production says barge in the boy and it is in the early stages of production but that's all i know about it and they see it seemed if i call the film office

which i've done a couple times red grandpa bridges album i asked them i can make sure that i get it into the movie that does seem that now that they've borrowed in my meeting here that the same kind of thing that every time i call them center their movie people somewhere doing movie things that are really don't know anything about probably just as well kc people asked me aren't you worried about what you're going to do with your book and actually i mean i'm not all things about the best of worlds if it turns out to be a terrific movie i wrote the book and hurt it badly that anything to do with it tony earley the author of the short story collection titled here we are in paradise the novel the boy and now a collection of essays titled somehow foreign affair and then does conclude our program and i hope you enjoyed it and i hope you'll join me next week as well when together we'll check out the fine print for national

public radio i'm rebecca bain we the fine print is produced by rebecca bain and scott smith for national public radio copies of the program are available on compact disc at a cost of twenty dollars order caucasus office monday through friday at six one five seven six l two nine or three you can hear the fine print any time by visiting our website you'll find more than two years worth of programs archived there you can also find more information about the fine print book club including a complete list of club selections the addresses w w w dot w p l n o r g