When the Book Stops Belonging to You

The first draft of The Better Son took me about four months to write.

That sounds much more efficient than it really was.

The story had been rolling around in my head for years. By the time I finally sat down to write it, much of the book was already there—not on paper, but somewhere in the back of my mind. The characters were my contemporaries. The world they inhabited was familiar to me. And when I wrote the flashbacks, I wasn't simply inventing a past. I was drawing on things I'd experienced, things my family had experienced, and a culture I knew firsthand.

That's one reason this book has always felt different from my earlier novels.

It is fiction, but it isn't entirely imaginary.

The problem was that my life isn't exactly the stuff of a thriller.

I've never been involved in a major crime. I haven't spent time running from the law. Most of my life has been considerably more boring than the lives of the people I write about.

So I had to borrow a crime.

But the crime isn't really the point of the story.

What interested me was what happens when ordinary people brush up against something extraordinary—and discover that it changes the way they see themselves, their families, and one another.

That's also why the flashbacks matter so much to me. I wanted the reader to feel the culture these characters came out of rather than simply be told about it. I've always admired writers who can make a particular time and place feel inhabited. Donald E. Westlake was a master at it. More recently, I've found that quality in Ron Currie's Babs Dionne books.

One of my beta readers understood exactly what I was trying to do. She is Italian-American and only a few years younger than I am, and she told me she loved the book partly because she recognized the world behind the story.

That meant a lot to me.

Because there's a question I've wrestled with throughout the writing of this book: Will anyone else care about this world?

The characters are my age. Some of the memories belong to a time that has already disappeared. The cultural references aren't necessarily the ones a younger reader would recognize. I've wondered whether that makes the story less relevant.

Then I remind myself that fiction has always done this.

A story doesn't have to belong to the reader's generation for the reader to recognize something human in it.

Now I'm at the point where the book is beginning to leave me.

That's a strange feeling after living with it for so long. For years I could change anything I wanted. A character could become someone different. A scene could disappear. I could rewrite a chapter at two in the morning because something about it bothered me.

Soon, other people will have opinions.

Agents will read it without knowing the history behind it. Readers will bring their own experiences to it. Some will understand what I was trying to do. Some won't. And some may notice things I never intended.

That's the deal.

At some point, a novelist has to stop protecting the book from the outside world.

The story that began as something deeply personal has to become somebody else's story.

I'm not sure I'm completely ready for that.

But I think the manuscript is.