Christopher Bollen's Last Resort
Season two is in full throttle now and we cannot wait to keep spoiling you listeners! In this episode of the Book Maven: A Literary Revue, Bethanne Patrick sits down with Christopher Bollen to talk about writing characters of all ages and grounding them with location and setting.King Lear is discussed in this week’s Pop! Goes the Culture, and all of its various adaptations. From queens to musicals, John Lennon to fictional rewrites, there is a version of King Lear for everyone to love.Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists. Titles include The Book of Love by Kelly Link, The God of the Woods by Liz Moore, Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The Garden by Claire Beams, Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst, and Wild Houses by Colin Barrett.Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.All titles mentioned: Havoc by Christopher Bollen, Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie,Shattered and My Beautiful Laundrette and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Lucy Greeley's Autobiography of a Face, Easy Beauty by Chloe Cooper Jones, In the Forest and A Pagan Place and The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien, Dublin Murder Squad (series) by Tana French, Small Things Like These and Foster by Claire Keegan, Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor, King Lear by William Shakespeare, “The Yiddish King Lear” and “Mirele Efros” by Jacob Gordin, “Vision of Lear” by Tadashi Suzuki and Toshio Hosokawa, A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley, “Succession” by Jesse Armstrong et. al, The Book of Love by Kelly Link, The God of the Woods by Liz Moore, Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleischman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The Garden by Claire Beams, Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst, and Wild Houses by Colin BarrettEpisode Transcript:BP: Welcome to season two of The Book Maven, a literary review. This season, we'll talk to leading authors, dive into the classics to decide which should stay in the literary canon, and I'll recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode, but first…CB: At first, I was thinking, "Let's talk to Chris about writing a character who is not at all like you. Okay, you know, an elderly woman." But then I thought, maybe it's more interesting to talk about writing a character who seems not to be like you at all, but really is like you.Yes. I mean, I think those are almost the same question.BP: Thank you. Please elaborate.CB: Um, well, you know, you always hear that old chestnut, "Write what you know." And I feel like, without meaning to, I sort of did in all of my previous books—uh, all five of them. Without really realizing it, they all kind of involve young people, semi-good-looking urbanites moving through the world. You know, that—BP: That can't be you, Chris, because you are totally good-looking. Okay, go ahead.CB: I did not mean to turn that into a compliment for myself. No, but just like my own age, and, um, it's sort of like these travelers, and, uh, I was actually, you know, so inspired to do Maggie that, once I got outside of myself—once I kind of stepped into the shoes of this 81-year-old, maybe homicidal widow—I felt like it was finally freeing.I finally felt like I could reach for high branches and do wild turns. It somehow opened me up and liberated me in a way that I think I was so hemmed in by writing my own experience that it had the opposite effect. I felt like I could do so much more getting outside of myself, and that's probably because, at heart, I'm an 81-year-old homicidal widow.No, it's… it's at heart because, uh, one, I do love... I've, you know, I think that what Calgary says, you—uh, I think when you're writing about someone who's 81, they've earned their wisdom. They're at an age where you can actually give them intelligence, wit, and a life of experiences. Whereas, when you're writing, say, like a 23-year-old, you always feel like you're making them— even though they're an adult—too precocious, or too well-lived, or too wise for their years.And so you're kind of always holding back a little bit. Um, and yet, for some reason, it was just so freeing to write someone who was 81 because she's earned it all, you know? She can say whatever she wants. And so it was me, but in this like, free way where you kind of can speak your mind, and, uh, you give her the benefit of the doubt.BP: This is such a turnabout to Patricia Highsmith writing Tom Ripley, uh, which is, I mean, you might be an 81-year-old woman at heart.CB: Thank you. She might have been a 20-something gay man at heart.BP: Uh, yes, but on… but on the other hand, as you say, in writing younger characters—I'm working on a character who is going to be aging throughout the course of a book right now.CB: Mm. And I have been. That's—BP: Interesting.CB: Yes. You know, because I've been thinking about that very thing. How do I take her from age 9 or 10 all the way to 60 or 65? And how do I make sure that she is not sounding the same all the way through? So that's a real concern. However, the joy, as you point out, about Maggie Burkhart is that you can give her the wisdom and the wit and the perspicacity of someone who is an octogenarian.BP: And of course, that also—and this is what is so delicious about Havoc—is it gives her the perspective of seeing that this child is not as sweet and innocent as everyone would like him to be. So, talk about that. Talk about how Maggie actually is able to see through this little boy's, um, you know, the easy appeal that children of his age have for other adults.CB: Well, I think in a way, I mean, even though they're sort of at opposite bookends of the life shelf, you know, um, at the very ends of life on each side, uh, they're almost treated similarly—the elderly and the very young—because in children, because they're the person in the room whose opinions you don't listen to, or the person who's overlooked, who's just sort of blends in.An old person or a child, you know? And they're also, uh, it's because, you know, they're not self-reliant, or they're not perceived as self-reliant. So, uh, they're these sort of characters that sort of fall into the background of rooms. And so, in a way, they're both suffering the same condition. They both kind of are lonely creatures that want to be seen and want to have agency in the world, but have none.And so that really interests me—writing about age. And that was one of the reasons I wanted to tackle it. Obviously, it came out of the pandemic. And in that period, there was this whole conversation: do you sacrifice the old for the young, or the young for the old?So, in a way, I wanted to sort of literalize that war between generations. I mean, this should have been a story about a sweet old lady who kind of takes on the grandmotherly role of a cute little boy. But, um, instead, it's, you know, the inverse in this crazy world that we live in.Because I think they’re both manipulative and learn how to exploit that perception of them as sort of these half-formed beings. And so, uh, that was really fun to play with. I mean, that was really exciting to work with, on both ends of the spectrum, with, uh, Otto as much as with Maggie. And actually, I found it much more challenging to write about an 8-year-old boy than I found to write about an 81-year-old woman.Especially an 8-year-old boy with an agenda.BP: How do you write that character and yet keep him true to his life experience, his measure of wisdom, which is—it can't be the same as Maggie's, and yet they are, um, if you will, playing on the same field. They're trying, it's like this, this incredible, it's not even a chessboard. It's a game of Go, right? You know, they’re on different levels, and they’re crossing each other. And, you know, so h… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenunbound.substack.com
