A Fictionalizing Life

You're a prolific writer—Phone Rings (see review, p. 33) is your 25th book. What's your writing schedule like?

I try to work every single day of the year. I get very antsy if I'm not working on something. I told myself for the first time in 45 years, "Just relax." But after about three days, it was impossible for my wife to live with me and for me to live with myself, so I started something. I'm always working. That's my great satisfaction.

The main character of Phone Rings is about your age, and in general, your characters tend to be in a situation similar to yours. How do you draw the line between autobiography and fiction?

My fiction has just about always paralleled my life. For instance, in [Phone Rings], it's true, I did have a brother who died while running, but we don't know how he really died. I do have a cat named Streak, but he wasn't buried alive. I do come from a family of seven children, but the second brother wasn't murdered in Turkey when he was 19. So I'm always taking from my life, but fictionalizing also.

You're often thought of as an avant-garde or experimental writer. Do you see yourself that way?

Yeah, I'm always trying to write in a different way than I wrote in the last book. I don't mind going over old ground in material; for instance, I've written about a drowned brother maybe three times already. But I like to deal with the structure and form, and that entails trying new ways of writing, which seem to just come out naturally every time. In fact, in the book I'm writing now, every single chapter is written in a different way.

This novel has a larger scope than Old Friends and many of your other books—the action takes place in many more locations and covers more people. Why did you decide to include those elements?

The last story was about friendship, and this one is about brotherhood, but I also wanted to write an epic novel about my family, or a family that resembles my family, and to span a couple of generations, which is something that I've never done.

Can you say a little bit more about the next book?

It's about the aging process, about frailty and feeling you're losing it and your memory's going. You're reminiscing and thinking about the things that you can't do anymore that were so exciting when you were much younger. The wonderful thing is that something always comes; I've never had a writing block. I just sit down at the typewriter, and once I've started something it just seems to build and goes into the next thing and the next thing. So the writing life is still very, very exciting, as exciting as it was when I first started.