Monday, May 21, 2012

Richard Ford Is a Man Who Actually Listens


By ANDREW GOLDMAN - Published: May 18, 2012  - The New York Times

Your new novel, “Canada,” is set in 1960, the year a teenager’s life changes when his parents rob a bank. Your father died of a heart attack that same year. I can’t imagine that’s a coincidence. 

It may be a subliminal thing. I would be foolish to say that that year wasn’t significant. And I have sometimes thought that because my father died when I was 16 that I write in a way that’s compensatory, that I write into a void that I never experienced. I’ve written two or three stories about boys and girls who have parents at age 16 and go on having parents at age 16 and what happens subsequent to that.
Photo - Brady Fontenot for The New York Times

Tell me about the day your father died. 

I remember being waked up on a Saturday morning by my father gasping for breath in the next room. My mother was trying to wake him up by shaking him, and she was saying his name, “Carrol, Carrol.” He kept having these big upheaval gasps, and I got into the bed with him and breathed in his mouth to perform some kind of resuscitative magic, but I think he was dead. My mother became hysterical at that point.
That sounds unbelievably scarring.
Well, I’m not much into scarring. I loved my father very much, but I knew that my life was going to change in ways that were going to make me perversely freer. My mother said to me, “Richard, you know I can’t take care of you anymore, you’re really going to have to take care of yourself,” and I just knew what that meant. I knew that a lot of decisions that had been made by them were now going to made by me.

It has been six years since your last novel was published, and I gather you weren’t writing for some of that time. What were you doing? Jack Daniel’s and the “Today” show?
Living, it’s called living. You might call it wasting time, but I just call it living. Going bird hunting, reading books, watching the Red Sox, doing things with my wife that we wouldn’t have time to do if I was writing a book. There’s a whole lot to do once you can get out from under the yoke of working.   

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