My life

Carol Goldberg wrote a piece in last week’s Sunday Hartford Courant about upcoming books by Connecticut authors, and UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO was included on her list.

I’m honored to have my book included on the list and am grateful to Goldberg for her generous comments regarding it, but I am also amused by the aspects of my biography that people choose to highlight when writing pieces like this.  The fact that I was robbed at gunpoint when I was 23 has never seemed as important as it has since I was published.  From the moment that SOMETHING MISSING hit the bookstore shelves, people have become utterly fascinated by certain elements of my life story.  My two near-death experiences, my brief time spent homeless, my engagement to my wife, my arrest and subsequent trial for a crime I did not commit, the year I shared a room with a goat, and many stories from my childhood.

The list goes on and on.   

While attending a book club meeting last week, discussion of the novel took a backseat for quite a while in favor of questions about the robbery and my life in general.  While people were more than pleased to talk about certain elements from the book, they seemed equally interested in hearing about my life. 

If this something that most authors experience? 

While I’ve toyed with the idea of writing a memoir from time to time, I’m only 38-years old.  It’s hard to imagine that I have led an interesting-enough life at this point to justify writing a book about it. 

It’s even harder to imagine that my life is actually interesting enough for anyone to want to read about it.

But maybe everyone feels this way.  Perhaps a person’s life just seems less fascinating to the person living it. 

Then again, I’m a fiction writer.  I could just make a bunch of stuff up.