Say "Connecticut" and you're likely to conjure in people's minds images of leafy bedroom towns whose tony residents commute to Manhattan, unwind at the country club, and send their kids to prep school. I come from the "other" Connecticut: east-of-the-Connecticut-river Connecticut. We're more feisty than fashionable, more liverwurst than pâté. Boston exerts a greater pull on us than New York, and so we drop our r's, root for the Red Sox, and use the word "wicked" as an adverb, as in this sentence: I'm happy to be in Ann Ahbuh with all you wicked good-lookin Bawduhs people. Norwich, the eastern Connecticut mill town where I was born and raised, is the prototype for Three Rivers, the fictional town where I have set two of my novels. Dominick and Thomas Birdsey in I Know This Much Is True and Caelum Quirk, the protagonist of The Hour I First Believed, were classmates as kids—baby boomers raised by their working-class families and by TV: Howdy Doody, Shindig, All in the Family, the news. Each evening after supper, avuncular Walter Cronkite delivered the daily rise and fall: the worrisome advances of Communists and cosmonauts, the Elvis and Beatles and hula hoop crazes, the assassination in Dallas, blood spilled in the South for a righteous cause and in Vietnam for a dubious one. The Birdsey brothers and Caelum Quirk were shaped by turbulent times, the tube, and an eastern Connecticut sensibility. So was I.

There were no pictures of my paternal grandfather, but I have his pocket watch. A railroad conductor from nearby Noank, he died in his early thirties, a victim of the influenza epidemic of 1918. His young widow was left with an infant son (my father) and no means of subsistence. Grandma took in laundry to survive, then got work as housekeeper to a British gentleman and his two sons. She married the elder son, a factory worker who moonlighted as a banjo player in a radio orchestra. Like the Birdsey twins, my maternal grandparents were southern Italian immigrants whose families had matched them for marriage. Grandpa was a cobbler, Nonna a homemaker who gave birth to eleven children. My mother, number eight, came into the world, like her siblings, on the kitchen table under the supervision of Auntie, Nonna's sister-in-law and midwife. "We never knew Mama was pregnant until Auntie showed up for the delivery," my mother once told me.

My mother was timid, devout, funny, and unfailingly kind. Like many raised in the Sicilian tradition, she wanted her children to remain in the fold when they came of age, kept safe from a world that could be hard-hearted and dangerous. "This is good, but don't get too smart," she once advised me, staring worriedly at a row of A's on my grammar school report card. "It's not good to be too smart." She herself was bright and had wanted to go to college to become a teacher. Nothing doing, her Old World father told her. Daughters didn't need higher education; they needed to help their mothers with the housework until they had a husband and a house of their own. Grandpa invited himself along on my parents' first date, sitting up front with his future son-in-law while his daughter rode in back. When Daddy entered the shoe shop to ask for my mother's hand, Grandpa gave him his blessing and a twenty dollar bill to be spent on groceries—a ringing endorsement, given the importance of food to Southern Italians. At the time, Daddy worked as a dyer at the woolen mill. Shortly after the wedding, the factory boss offered him a foreman's position. My father wanted to accept, but it would have meant relocating to the state of Maine. Nothing doing, my mother told him. She couldn't live that far away from her family. So Daddy quit the mill and took a job shoveling coal at Norwich's Department of Public Utilities at half his factory pay. But if there was sacrifice on his part, there was reward as well. Having prioritized famiglia above career advancement, my father, a self-described "swamp Yankee" with only a skeleton crew of blood relatives, was brought into the fold of his wife's large and loving Italian clan. Through the years, Daddy rose through the ranks at the utilities company and retired as a superintendent. He never really liked being the boss, but he sure liked to make people laugh. He was a great storyteller—a raconteur with a million poems, ditties, limericks and jokes in his repertoire—a good number of them inappropriate. ("Hey, did you hear the one about the woman who refused to wear underpants? She went to confession, and for her penance, the priest gave her three Our Fathers, three Hail Marys, and five cartwheels.") My father loved to sing, too. "Rockabye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody" and "When the Saints Go Marching In" were his two favorites. "Daddy! Stop!" I would plead when I was a kid, clapping my hands to my ears and running from the room whenever his crooning began. Now I wish I could hear him sing again.

We lived on McKinley Avenue, a five-minute walk from downtown—or, as Norwichites called it back then, "downcity." The Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse galloped thunderously through my formative years, and by this I mean not Conquest, Slaughter, Famine, and Death but Vita, Gail, Sandy and April, my bossy older sisters and the bossy girl cousins who lived just down the street. The only other boy on McKinley Avenue, Vito Signorino, threw rocks at me. That left me, by default, in the relatively safe clutches of Vita, Gail, Sandy, and April—and here I refer to physical, not psychological, safety. My sisters and cousins favored imaginative play over sports or board games. More often than not, I was the outside observer of their strange and exotic recreations, but occasionally I'd be recruited for one of the girls' games of pretend—cast usually in the role of victim. In "Hospital," they were nurses who got to "vaccinate" me with straight pins from my mother's sewing box. For "Death Drums," they fashioned sarongs from old dining room curtains and, as Amazons, locked me in the existential darkness of Nonna's canning closet. Beating on the skin of our Uncle Joe's conga drum, they chanted, with mounting hysteria, "Death drums! Death drums!"—a memory which gives me the shakes fifty years later. Inching toward puberty and inspired by a bolt of pink net fabric that had somehow found its way into our house, the Four Horsewomen invented a naughty game called "Kingy Boy." I was the titular Kingy Boy in this one—a seven-year-old sultan required only to sit cross-legged on the floor with a towel wrapped around my head turban-style while my sisters and cousins, harem girls wrapped in yards of pink net, danced and undulated around me, chanting, "Kingy Boy! O Kingy Boy!"

When the game was over, I was warned not to tell Ma about it. Instead, on my very first trip to the confessional in preparation for First Communion, I spilled the beans to Father Ziegler. "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been zero weeks since my last confession. These are my sins. I told three fibs, I called my sister a stupid snot, and I played Kingy Boy."

Father's shadow shifted behind the screen. "Well, all right, then. For your penance, I want you to say three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys. Now let me hear you make a good act of… you played what?" When I explained the gist of the game, Father told me Kingy Boy was probably not a sin, but he tacked on another couple of Hail Marys anyway.



Upon graduation from high school in 1968, I left Norwich and enrolled twenty miles up the road at the University of Connecticut. The four years I spent there were turbulent and seductive—an era in which world politics and cultural sea changes invited baby boomers like me to fight for social justice and "party hardy." The sexual revolution had arrived and marijuana smoke perfumed the dorm. The Vietnam war and the civil rights battle intensified, and the soundtrack of those years segued from This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius to By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong to Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, we're finally on our own. Prepare ourselves for the "real world"? Shit, man, we were going to fix what was wrong with it. "I'm on strike!" I told my father over the phone after the invasion of Cambodia and the killings at Kent State. "The hell you are!" he shouted into the receiver. "You get to class!" But Richard Nixon and Walter Lamb Sr. were more or less interchangeable that spring, so I hung up the phone, stuck my fist in the air, and joined the protest.

At the end of that wild four-year ride at UConn, I did not launch myself into the chaotic world at large. My mother's son, I took a U-turn, returning to Norwich to teach English at the high school from which I'd graduated. My first classes were the ones no other teacher wanted, comprised of students who'd stayed back so many times, a few of them were my age, twenty-one. "The sweathogs," they were fond of calling themselves. My plan was to win them over by releasing them from the prison that school had been for them until my arrival. I would open their minds by making their education relevant. The sweathogs and I honeymooned for about a week, until the day when I approached Seth Jinks, a surly senior, and asked him to take his head off his desk and pay attention. Seth worked nights and slept at school during the day. He raised his head as I had asked, opened his bloodshot eyes, and said, "Why don't you go fuck yourself?" The class and I held our collective breath. I had no idea how to respond. Mercifully, Seth unfolded his long legs, stood, and ambled voluntarily out the door and up to the principal's office, thereby saving my teaching career. I remained at that school for the next twenty-five years.

I became a good teacher and was a good and dutiful son. I visited my parents often, attended family picnics, served as a pallbearer at my aunts' and uncles' funerals. Along the way, I fell in love with and married a pretty local girl of Italian, Portugese, and Polish blood. Christine is, today, my bride of thirty years. We have three sons. When I count my blessings, Chris and the guys are at the top my list.

I was thirty when I wrote my first short story and have been writing fiction now for over twenty-five years. In 1992, the phone rang and the caller claimed she was Oprah Winfrey. Yeah, right, I remember thinking, and I'm Geraldo Rivera. But it really was Oprah, calling to thank me for having written my just-published first novel, She's Come Undone. "I couldn't stop reading it," she said. "You owe me two nights' sleep." Oprah called me again in 1997 to say that she'd started a new feature on her show to promote the pleasures and challenges of reading. She's Come Undone became the third title of the phenomenonally popular Oprah's Book Club. The following year, I Know This Much Is True became an Oprah Book Club selection, too. "It's not just a book," she told her vast TV audience. "It's a life experience." These endorsements of my work have been both a boon and a blessing, and Oprah's philosophy—"Take what you need and pass on the rest to others"—has guided me as well. As I have received, I have tried to give back as generously as I can. That resolution led me to my volunteer work at York Correctional Institute, Connecticut's maximum-security women's prison. To date, my writing students there have published two collections of autobiographical essays, Couldn't Keep It to Myself (2003) and I'll Fly Away (2007).



In his wondrous memoir, Growing Up, Russell Baker writes, "We all come from the past, and children ought to know what it was that went into their making—to know that life is a braided cord of humanity stretching up from time long gone, and that it cannot be defined by the span of a single journey from diaper to shroud." I am, when I write fiction, people other than myself. And many times each week, I am not just the 57-year-old novelist I turned out to be, but also all the other selves I have been—the novice teacher, the student protester in tie-dye and love beads, the new father witnessing a delivery room miracle, Kingy Boy. I am also, as Baker suggests, all who have come before me. I was born before my father, as my sons were born before I was. The product of a specific time and place, each of us is much more than that. That's a lesson I re-learn daily when I face the blank page, the glowing screen of the computer monitor, and one which I put to use while writing The Hour I First Believed.

You know, I had a terrible time starting that damned book. A year's worth of promising beginnings fizzled into false starts. I had a waiting readership, a book contract, and a deadline… but no story. In the midst of this creative drought, I agreed to teach a writing seminar at the Tennessee Williams Festival in New Orleans. It was my first visit to that city, and I mostly avoided the conference socializing in favor of walking the streets alone. My wandering led me to St. Louis Cathedral on busy Jackson Square in the city's French Quarter. Outside there was revelry—jugglers, street musicians, dancing, drinking—but the cavernous church was empty. In my forlorn state, I lit a candle, knelt, and prayed to… well, I don't know who, exactly. The muse? The gods? The ghost of Tennessee Williams? "Whoever or whatever you are," I said, "please let me discover a story." Shortly after that trip, I began this novel in earnest. This was the first sentence that my then-nameless, identityless protagonist spoke to me: My mother was a convicted felon, a manic-depressive, and Miss Rheingold of 1950.*



(*From 1942 to 1964, Rheingold, an East Coast beer, held an annual "election" in which the public voted to decide which of six "candidates"—models, mostly—would reign as spokeswoman for the following year. The contest, a promotional juggernaut, made Rheingold New York's best-selling beer.)

In the nine years it's taken me to construct the novel, the ground has shifted beneath us all. School shootings, 9-11, Hurricane Katrina, the protracted war in Iraq: these have altered us, collectively and as individuals. As I struggled to understand what was happening to our nation and our world, I looked to and was guided by ancient myth. I placed my fictional protagonist inside a confounding non-fictional maze and challenged him to locate, at its center, the monsters he would need to confront and the means by which he might save himself and others. Along the way to discovering Caelum Quirk's story, I, too, wandered down corridors baffling and unfamiliar, investigating such topics as the invisible pull of ancestry, chaos-complexity theory, and spirituality—my own and Caelum's. The former strand is given voice in the letters and diary entries of Caelum's forebears: suffragists and Civil War soldiers, actors and acquaintances of Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla and Dorothea Dix. The latter two strands are symbolized by a pair of totem creatures from the natural world: the butterfly and the praying mantis.

My volunteer teaching at York Prison has been concurrent with, and integral to, the discovery and execution of this story. I began facilitating the writing workshop there the same month I started work on the novel—a dozen or so weeks after the massacre at Columbine High School. On the afternoon of April 20, 1999, my wife Christine and I were here in Boston, where I was to receive the New England Book Award for fiction. I was tying my necktie in front of the bathroom mirror of our hotel room when I heard, from the other side of the door, Chris's distress: "Oh! Oh, no! Oh, god!" A few seconds later, I was staring at CNN's live coverage of the chaotic events unfolding at Columbine.

Two and a half years later, I sat before the television again, along with the rest of America, staring in disbelief at the smoke rising from the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the file footage of Osama Bin-Laden kneeling and firing his rifle at a terrorist training camp. On impulse, I turned off the TV and drove to my sons' schools, where I circled the parking lots, trying to decide whether to let my kids be or to go inside and sign them out so that I might keep them safe. But safe from what? From whom? My fear was at the wheel that day, and I see now that I was confusing the actions of the terrorist hijackers with the actions, two years prior, of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

Although The Hour I First Believed is a work of fiction, it explores such non-fictional tragedies as war, catastrophic fire, violent weather, and school shootings by interfacing imagined characters with people who exist or existed. Why did I choose to access the actual instead of taking the safer and more conventional novelist's approach of creating fictional approximations of easily recognizable non-fictional people and events? Why, specifically, did I take on the tragic events that occurred in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999?

Because the depth and scope of Harris and Klebold's rage, and the twisted logic by which they convinced themselves that their slaughter of the innocent was justified, both frightened and confounded me. I felt it necessary to confront the "two-headed monster" itself, rather than concoct Harris and Klebold-like characters. Were these middle-class high school kids merely sick, or were they evil? What might their words and actions, their Internet spewings and videotaped taunts, tell us about how to prevent some future tragedy? Were they anomalies, or harbingers of school violence to come? Sadly, that latter question has been answered in the years since Columbine, at middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities in California, Minnesota, Colorado, Arkansas, Mississippi, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. And it is a bitter irony that, on the day I finished this manuscript and mailed it off to my publisher, a graduate student emerged from behind a curtain inside a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University, raised his gun, and shot 21 victims, five of them fatally, before taking his own life. Why all this rage? Why all these deaths and broken-hearted survivors? I hope and pray that The Hour I First Believed, in some small way, might broaden understanding, the better to prevent future tragedy.

The year I began this novel, our elder two sons were a college freshman and a high school freshman and our youngest was in thrid grade. Today that third-grader is eighteen and his older brothers are both teachers, working with the storm-tossed children of New Orleans. Whenever I visit my boys in the Big Easy, I make it a point to go back to St. Louis Cathedral, where I give thanks to the greater power than I that allowed me to find and tell my story. Having affixed its last period to its final sentence, I now release it to my readers and invite them to find in it whatever they want or need to find. But I hope the book advances the notion that power must be used responsibly and mercifully, and that we are all responsible for one another. These things I believe:

—That as James Baldwin once put it, "People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes back to them, poisoned."

—That wars, because of the terrible cost they exact, are never won.

—That love is stronger than hatred.