Tom Robbins had no intention of writing a memoir. “I was conned into it by the women in my life,” he says with a laugh during a call to his home in the small town of La Conner, Washington.

“They had been pestering me to write down the stories that I’d been telling them—bidden and unbidden—over the years. I wrote 20 pages and showed it to them, thinking that would shut them up. But it had the opposite effect.”

Bless the women in Tom Robbins’ life! They forced him into committing to paper Tibetan Peach Pie, a book that in conversation Robbins calls “an account of my personal pursuit of the marvelous” and in print carries the subtitle “A True Account of an Imaginative Life.” The book is both of these—and more.

Robbins calls his colorful new memoir “an account of my personal pursuit of the marvelous.”

Robbins, as fans of novels like Another Roadside Attraction (1971), Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), Jitterbug Perfume (1980) or Villa Incognito (2003) know, has a Trickster spirit. He performs a sort of verbal-spiritual-comedic magic on the page. He characterizes his philosophical outlook, formed in part from his interest in Japan and Zen Buddhism, as “crazy wisdom and sacred mischief.”

“When I was in Japan,” he explains, “I got to have an audience with a famous Ninja, quite an old man. His house was full of Mickey Mouse memorabilia. This is true of the wisest people I have encountered in my life. They have all had this sense of playfulness. I think I was more or less born with it. It’s maintaining a fixed eye on the ultimate seriousness of life, but refusing to take events and, particularly, yourself too seriously.”

This energy and perspective also infuses Robbins’ memoir. Beginning as a child growing up in North Carolina and Virginia in the 1930s, Robbins writes that he was possessed by a seemingly inborn bohemianism and a “congenitally comic sensibility” that led his mother to lovingly refer to him as Tommy Rotten. He had a wandering, freedom-seeking spirit. He spent time in a military boarding school (where in a quixotic effort he foolishly re-entered a burning dormitory), time at Washington and Lee University (where Tom Wolfe, a founder of new journalism, was a big man on campus), and time in the U.S. Air Force in Korea (where he taught techniques of weather observation). He had four short marriages early in adulthood and, since 1987, a long one. He was an early, enthusiastic adopter of LSD and describes the first time he tried it as “the most rewarding day of my life, the one day I would not trade for any other.” He writes about, among many other events, encounters with Timothy Leary and Charles Manson and trips to far-flung regions of the world.

But Robbins also had an early love of words and stories. He won prizes—even in Air Force story-writing contests—for his fiction. He became a journalist. He was an art critic and music critic for underground newspapers in Seattle. And then he went to a concert by The Doors.

“It was so unlike any rock concert that Seattle had seen to that point. It just blew everybody away. I was in almost a traumatized state, an ecstatic trauma, when I went back to my house and up into the attic and sat down to write the review. It wasn’t that I was influenced by particular lyrics or by Jim Morrison’s style. It was such a cathartic experience that it loosened up something in my creative process. Almost instinctively I wrote the review. And then I thought, this is the way I want to sound from now on.”

Robbins’ first published novel, Another Roadside Attraction, became a kind of anthem of ’60s (or early ’70s) youth culture. “In that novel,” Robbins says, “I attempted not to write about the ’60s but to recreate the ’60s. In order to do that, I had to reinvent the novel, because the traditional novel moves from minor climax to minor climax to major climax, up an incline plane. But that didn’t lend itself to capturing that period with any depth or truth.”

“Sometimes the muse shows up and sometimes she doesn’t. But at least she knows where you’ll be at 10 o’clock in the morning. She doesn’t have to look for you in the bars or along the beaches.”

That novel captured the zeitgeist so successfully that to this day people assume that Robbins writes while stoned and that his sensibilities are trapped in the ’60s. These assumptions make Robbins laugh. He writes in the memoir that he is a slow and deliberate writer who avoids even mild stimulants while working and that the concerns of his novels have moved further forward into issues of contemporary life than the outdated views of his critics. Robbins’ beautifully profligate prose is labored over one sentence at a time. “If you’re a professional, you show up every day,” he says. “Sometimes the muse shows up and sometimes she doesn’t. But at least she knows where you’ll be at 10 o’clock in the morning. She doesn’t have to look for you in the bars or along the beaches.”

However, for the genre of fiction and the genre of memoir, Robbins waits on slightly different muses. About writing fiction, Robbins says, “I am one of the rare breed of writers who believes that the best part of writing is creating situations in which language can happen. I have to surround the act of writing with an aura of surprise and terror. So I take my research and imagination and my sense of humor and my vague feelings of where I want my day to go and pack them into my little canoe and push out onto the vast and savage ocean and see where the current takes me.”

Of this memoir he says, “I’m not inventing situations, I’m dealing with facts. The challenge for me was to keep the language lively and unpredictable, while remaining faithful to the facts.”

In July, Robbins will turn 82. That hardly seems possible given the antic energy of Tibetan Peach Pie. Wikipedia  and the Library of Congress can’t believe it either—they assert that Robbins is 4 years younger. “Wikipedia,” Robbins wryly notes, “is the fountain of youth. They obviously know more about me than my mother.”

These days Robbins goes to yoga and pilates classes, travels with his wife Alexa, and still shows up on time for his muse. In other words he stays connected with the women we must thank for his new memoir.

“I’ve had a messy life,” Robbins admits. “But in the tangle, I think the silver thread of spirituality, the red thread of passion and, of course, the elastic and multicolored thread of imagination have constantly run through it. And all of that is bound together with the inky thread of writing.”

That’s a self-assessment that sounds just about right.

Author photo credit Jeff Corwin.

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In her lovely new memoir, My Salinger Year, Joanna Rakoff takes readers on a tour of mid-1990s New York City—from the hallowed halls of an esteemed literary agency to the not-yet-gentrified streets of Williamsburg—as she settles in to her first real job.

What inspired you to write the book? Is there any significance to the timing of the publication?
This is a surprisingly difficult and complicated question, as My Salinger Year could also be called “The Book I Kept Trying Not to Write!”

The story is this: Many years ago, when I was trying to make my way as a freelance magazine writer—and largely failing—I called the most seasoned, accomplished journalist in my acquaintance, veteran Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal, and begged him to have coffee with me, in the hopes that he’d be able to help me find my way. Somehow, we got to talking about my first job, working for J.D. Salinger’s agent, answering his fan mail, and I explained that I began corresponding with some of the fans, and that Salinger decided to publish a new book during my stint at the agency. And Ralph just looked at me and said, “You need to write about this.” I’m not a person who tends to write much about myself—I was working on a novel at the time and all my magazine pieces were straight journalism—so I just sort of laughed nervously, though I knew he was right.

But it took me years to follow his advice, in part because the culture of “the Agency,” as I call it in the book, is one of secrecy. Or perhaps privacy would be a better term. So much of our time and energy was spent protecting Salinger’s privacy. And it was very clear that I was not meant to speak about Salinger outside of the office. It was a bit like working for the CIA.

Anyway, in 2003, I finally wrote a piece—a long essay—on answering Salinger’s fan mail, and I was naively shocked by the response it got! I was in Maine, at a friend’s wedding, when the piece came out, and reporters began calling the house, trying to interview me, purely because I’d met Salinger once. Editors and agents contacted me as well, asking if I’d turn the essay into a book. But I was still working on that novel, and I didn’t want to put it on hold. And I already had an agent, who said, “Listen, if you write a book on Salinger before your novel comes out, you’ll be known as ‘the Salinger Girl.’ That’s not you. We don’t want that. Finish your novel.”

I followed her advice. That novel, A Fortunate Age, came out in 2009. And I began working on another one (Money or Love, which should be complete by the end of this year), but when Salinger died, I wrote another piece about working at the Agency, and was again overwhelmed by the attention it received. That piece was turned into a full-length radio documentary for the BBC, and as I wrote the script for that documentary—and researched both Salinger and his fans, and the era during which I worked for “the Agency”—a larger story, a story of social change, a story about coming of age at the moment the digital revolution arose, began to materialize. When I was approached, again, about turning the story into a book, I still hesitated. For a few months even. But then, one day, the first few pages of the book sort of floated into my head. I sat down and pounded them out, and the narrative arc began to take shape for me. I said yes.

I think the truth is that I needed time. It was almost 20 years ago, now, that I worked at the Agency. I needed those years to see the story for what it was.

"Salinger had never been anything but kind and funny to me on the phone, and after reading his works I found myself, strangely or no, perhaps a bit more nervous about talking to him. A bit more in awe of him. Though since I was the most naïve, awkward, young person ever to have lived, “more nervous” isn’t saying all that much."

Did you consult any of your former colleagues at “the Agency” either while writing the book or later, to let them know it’s coming out? Will it be the first they’ve heard of your personalized responses to Salinger’s fan mail, or did they already know?
I did! Perhaps because one’s first job is such a formative experience, I stayed in touch with a good number of my co-workers from that time. The character known as “Max” in the book is one of my favorite people in the world, and I was glad for the excuse to sit down and talk with him about that time. I also had some long lunches with two of the assistants with whom I worked—one of whom is now a big-deal agent in her own right—and some others, and it was just fascinating to see what people remember and what they don’t. One person remembered, so clearly, all the little physical details of the office: The strange steel cases in which we kept what were known as “cards”—these bits of paper on which we recorded when and where a particular manuscript was sent. The color of the enormous filing cabinets.

Most of the my co-workers still work in publishing, but one, the agent known as James was rather difficult to track down. He’d been at the Agency for something like ten years when I left, and though he had his own office and was taking on clients, he was still officially an assistant. To me, he represented a very particular corner of New York life: He lived on the Upper East Side and wore crisp Brooks Brothers shirts, and his wife was something of a socialite. So I was surprised to discover him living off the grid in Vermont, on a farm, with chickens. I drove up to visit him, and it was wonderful to see this person I remembered as rather tense looking almost exuberant with happiness.

Because I’ve already written a couple of essays on my highly unorthodox  responses to the fans, I don’t know if my co-workers will be all that surprised. I heard through the grapevine that my old boss was “tickled” by that first essay I wrote, back in 2003, and I do hope it’s true! At the risk of sounding hokey: I wrote this book from a place of love and admiration. This is not a gossipy tell-all. Or a take-down. It’s not The Devil Wears Prada.

Like you, I first read Salinger in my mid-20s, and so I loved your description of devouring his works in a weekend.  How did having read his books impact how you felt about your job? About Salinger, himself?
I say in the book that my boss—and the Agency, as a whole—felt less like a business and more like a temple: There was an almost religious quality to their work, as if Salinger were a god, and the other well-known writers to whom they tended—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Dylan Thomas, to name a few—were demi-gods. Our job was to protect and serve them, in every way.  Before I read Salinger, it was easy for me to scoff at this, but—and this is the truth—after I read his works, I thought, “okay, I get it.” I thought, “he really is a genius. And he really is, in a way, too sensitive—too something—for this world. He needs the Agency’s protection.” My job took on newfound importance. I became a true believer. It was a bit like being inculcated into a cult!

Salinger had never been anything but kind and funny to me on the phone, and after reading his works I found myself, strangely or no, perhaps a bit more nervous about talking to him. A bit more in awe of him. Though since I was the most naïve, awkward, young person ever to have lived, “more nervous” isn’t saying all that much.

What’s behind your decision to refer to your boss as simply “my boss” and the agency as simply “the Agency”?
I struggled, for some time, to find the right tone and style for the book. The first person doesn’t come naturally to me, so that was part of it, but I was also nervous that my story—the story I had to tell—was just so small and insignificant. For the first six months—or year—of working on the book, I had trouble truly immersing myself in it, giving myself over to it.

Meanwhile, I’d been struggling to figure out pseudonyms for all the characters—as I wanted them in place early on, so that I could begin thinking of them more as true characters, if that makes sense—but I couldn’t figure out anything for my boss. As a placeholder, I simply called her “my boss” and in doing so suddenly everything fell into place. Somehow, by calling the agency “the Agency” and my boss “my boss,” it made the story more universal, larger, and allowed me to think of it as something slightly outside myself.

I also, you’ll notice, never name “my college boyfriend.” He’s just “my college boyfriend.”

Typewriters, Dictaphones—What was the single most bizarre practice that you encountered at the Agency?
Oh, gee! How to choose! Well, taking dictation—if that’s the right term for what I did, which was typing letters that my boss had dictated into her recorder—was pretty strange. It feels incredibly intimate, this voice murmuring in your ear. But perhaps the strangest, funniest little task came about when the Agency obtained a computer. One computer for the entire office, with one email account. I was allowed to use the computer purely for Agency business, including checking the Agency email, and printing out any pertinent notes for my boss, who would then dictate responses for me, which I would then type, on my typewriter, and after she approved them, retype them into the computer.

Whatever became of Don? Did he publish his novel?
Don, alas, never found a publisher for his novel. He did, however, publish a nonfiction book—part memoir, part straight nonfiction—about boxing, and another book about Brooklyn. I’ve not read either, but I’m told that I appear in each. As he got older, the age of the women he dated remained the same. (Or so I’m told.) He never married.

You left the Agency after a year. Where was your next position? Have you ever regretted not having chosen the path to becoming a literary agent?
After I left the Agency, I went to work for an agent who’d briefly merged her own independent agency with the Agency. We overlapped just momentarily there, but I really loved her, and when she left the Agency, she offered me a job. Because she was an independent agent—she worked out of her home, a beautiful, enormous apartment overlooking the Hudson—she allowed me more flexibility with hours, which, in turn, allowed me to enroll in Columbia’s MFA program, where I began writing for magazines, under the tutelage of Lis Harris and Alice Quinn. She’s a wonderful person—and a wonderful agent—and became a sort of older sister or aunt figure in my life. I loved her—love her—and loved working for her, but it became abundantly clear to me, during my time with her, that I don’t have the right personality to be an agent. I just don’t have the social or business instincts necessary for that line of work.

So, no, I’ve never regretted not becoming an agent. I’m too fond of sitting in bed, in my pajamas, inventing lives or chronicling my own.

How did your time at the Agency impact your own development as a writer?
In a way, working at the Agency made me a writer. All those letters to the Salinger fans? They lent me confidence and authority. They were my first real works! Somehow, writing as Joanna Rakoff of the Agency—rather than just plain old Joanna Rakoff—allowed me to be more bold and forthright, to jump off a cliff in the way you need to when writing.

But working at the Agency also demystified publishing for me in a profound and important way. Knowing how publishing worked allowed me, as a writer, to simply forget about the business side of writing and just write. I didn’t burn energy worrying or wondering about how to get published. The Agency taught me that good work gets published. My job was simply to make my work as good as it could possibly be. Not to worry about how it would get out in the world.

If you had to choose one adjective to describe your “Salinger Year,” what would it be, and why?
Transformative. Exhilarating. Fun. (That’s three. Sorry.)

What’s next for you?
Well, I’m working on a novel, Money or Love, about a trio of families whose lives have been wrecked—in different ways—by the economic crisis of 2008. Cheerful, I know! But I love these characters—even the banker who ends up making money off his neighbors’ bad loans; even the awful, emotionally frozen loser husband, who’d rather let his wife apply for food stamps than get a blue-collar job—and I look forward to spending time with them every day. I keep hoping I can find a happy ending for them. . . .

Author photo credit David Ignaszewski.

A portion of this article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of this book.

Dante scholar Joseph Luzzi recounts his immigrant childhood and his complicated relationship with his parents’ homeland in a captivating new memoir, My Two Italies.

Why did you decide to write this book?
I’ve wanted to write My Two Italies for some 20 years now, ever since I began my graduate studies in Italian at Yale in 1994. From the moment I decided to turn my love for Italian into my career path, I felt a strong desire to share my fascination with the immigrant southern Italian world I came from and the cultural treasures from northern Italy I was studying. But, of course, back then I wasn’t nearly knowledgeable or capable enough to write a book of this nature; I had lots of learning ahead of me.

So I kept this project in the back of my mind for many years, until finally, in 2011, the year of Silvio Berlusconi’s resignation from the premiership amid a welter of controversy, the time seemed ripe. I had by then started writing about Italy and culture for non-specialist audiences—mostly essays and reviews—and I sensed that something momentous was happening in Italy, some transition that would fundamentally affect the nation for generations to come. At that point, I felt I had to tell my story and share my understanding of Italian and Italian-American culture because I truly believed that it was impossible to understand the crises that Italy was undergoing—its political struggles under Berlusconi, its ongoing battle with corruption, the tensions between its youth and an aging population—without going back (in some cases way back, all the way to Dante) in Italian history. It was then that I believed my family history could bring readers inside some of the mysteries of Italian culture writ large.

You say that you’re “Italian and American” as opposed to being an “Italian-[hyphen] American.” What’s the distinction—as you see it?
When I was growing up, I wanted nothing to do with either the “Italian” world of my parents and older siblings—all of whom were born in Calabria in the Italian south—or the “Italian-American” world of spaghetti and meatballs, Godfather movies, and bocce tournaments that surrounded me. Like most kids, I just wanted to fit in, blend in with the other americani. It’s impossible to overstate just how not typically “suburban American” my parents were, even though we actually lived in the lovely coastal suburbs of Rhode Island. My parents raised their own livestock (there seemed to be slaughtered chickens everywhere I turned), cured sausage and prosciutto in the cellar, and made me bring to school these horrifying pepper-and-egg sandwiches on homemade rolls that would drip grease on the aluminum foil when I sat down to eat them in the lunchroom. I imagined that all the other kids were staring at my freakish meal—I would have given anything for one of their bland, patriotic peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches on Wonder Bread. So I was in between two worlds: too much a child of my Calabrian parents to fit in with the kids in the cafeteria, yet too attuned to the English language and the American games and sports of my classmates to be as authentically “Italian” as the Calabrian branch of my family. There was no hyphen for me, with its implication of seamlessly blended ethnicities. That feeling of being both a bit—just a bit—Italian and American reminded me that I inhabited an ethnic limbo, separated from my parents’ Italian homeland while also wondering if I would ever truly fit into this new American world.

What was your relationship with your father like during his final years?
It was not an easy one. After I graduated from college in Boston, I moved back home for a while, and he would drive me to my job at a local copy shop on the University of Rhode Island campus. For a full forty-five minutes on the road he wouldn’t say a word to me. He would just stare ahead, grimly focused on the drive, listening to Salty Brine spin the oldies on a crackling AM radio station as we rolled past the turf farms of URI. The ride felt so symbolic: growing up, we never had those normal father-son conversations that, I imagined with wild jealousy, all my other friends enjoyed with their dads (at least that’s the way it appeared to work on TV). And yet I worshiped him. He had an aura about him, with the absolute command he emanated at home, and the astonishing care and perfectionism he put into everything he did, from his manicured garden and oversized vegetables to his legendary homemade wine. Even the waves of his salt-and-pepper hair fell perfectly into place. I realize now what I could not fathom then: we were from completely different worlds, and understanding between us was impossible. By my mid-20s I had graduated from college and held a series of half-baked jobs, just like the one at the copy shop he drove me to; by his mid twenties he had endured soul-crushing poverty, fought for Italy in World War II, and survived years as a military internee—essentially forced labor—in Nazi Germany. I think the ease of my life—which he must have seen as frivolity—embarrassed him.

I remember once, when I played for the number two spot on my high school tennis team, he showed up at the Weekapaug courts in his Chevy Malibu (the same one in which we would ride in silence). He had sworn to me before the match that he was going to pull me off the courts, “davant’ a tutti,” “in front of everyone,” because I was burning expensive holes in my sneakers that we could not afford to replace. He wanted me to play in work shoes. I tried to stare down my archrival, whose wealthy family had a tennis court in their backyard—but I couldn’t focus on his white Rossignol racket with my father haunting the parking lot, just an overhead smash away from the Atlantic Ocean. My father silently raged in the car while I played, my mother expressionless beside him. She must have talked him out of his plan: after the match he just drove away. Needless to say, I lost in straight sets.

Your daughter Isabel will turn 7 this year. Are you teaching her Italian?
I have tried to teach Isabel Italian in fits and starts, but I’m embarrassed to say that thus far I haven’t been able to put together a sustained plan. Part of the blame, I guess, is on my own laziness—since I teach Italian language and culture for a living it is hard for me to stay in work mode when I come home from campus and see Isabel. And I admit I find it somewhat artificial to speak to her in a different language from the English that’s being used all around us.

But there may be a deeper reason that has held me back. Growing up, I desperately wanted my parents, with their heavily accented attempts at English (for example, “she’s a’ no’ home” for “he’s not home”) to speak proper English, and I felt that mastering the language of our new American world would be the most important and effective way of assimilating. Plus, I fell in love with English. Books became a second home to me, as Shakespeare, Dickens, Hemingway, Joyce, and other masters of the English language became passports to alternate realms, past and present, that my working-class family could not afford to travel to. Although the Italian language is profoundly important to me, I wonder if the English I speak with Isabel is somehow making up for a connection to the “American” language that I felt was missing from my own childhood all those years ago.

Has your daughter taken on any of the Calabrian traits and values of your mother?

That’s a great question. . . . Yes, I do feel my parents in her in a way that sometimes floors me. Calabrians can be known—not so flatteringly—as teste dure, “hard heads,” capable of some pretty profound stubbornness. But I think it’s more than that. For centuries, life in this impoverished southern Italian region was extremely demanding, so much so that it became synonymous with la miseria, literally “the misery”—a term denoting pervasive hardship and scarcity that bred a fatalistic worldview about the inevitable suffering life entails. To survive in this world, you had to be tough—real tough. And my family had this quality in abundance, especially my father, who endured World War II, Nazi Germany, immigration, and a life of severe labor, both as a factory worker and a landscaper. I feel that, in my own life, when I’ve faced particularly challenging or daunting circumstances, I’ve been able to draw on this instinctual “Calabrian” residue of will, even hard-headedness, in confronting a problem and making it to the other side. My daughter Isabel is a wonderfully sweet and loving kid, but she has this iron will—she simply will not give in on certain things, no matter how much she is asked to do so. This has made for some trying moments as a parent—but I can also sense her Calabrian ancestry speaking through her, and deep down I pray that this “testa dura” quality will stay with her (or at least fully blossom when she’s 18 and away at college!).

Do you view “The Sopranos” and “Jersey Shore” as legitimate expressions of the Italian-American character—or is there such a thing?

Yes, I do believe that in some ways “The Sopranos” and “Jersey Shore” are legitimate expressions of the Italian-American character, and that’s partly why I find them so potentially troubling—and not because I think that they promote dangerous stereotypes about Italian Americans. I believe that most who watch these programs understand that they are not fully representative of the Italian-American “experience.” After all, Italian Americans have produced two Supreme Court justices, four mayors of New York City, a woman vice presidential candidate and a president of Yale, to name just a few of the more prominent. But I do think that “The Sopranos” and “Jersey Shore” strike a cord deep within the public about Italian-American culture—just as, before them, the Godfather films did. Most Italians are descendants from poor families in the Italian south, and thus were cut off from a lot of the cultural developments in northern Italy. Moreover, many southern Italians viewed Italian unification itself—a belated political process that only took place in 1861—as the spread of northern political power into the south (and thus, no cause for patriotic celebration). I think that many Italian immigrants carried with them, out of Italy and into America, this sense of alienation from both “high” Italian culture and a cohesive sense of Italian national identity. These immigrants—my parents among them—tended to identify more with their region than with Italy as a whole.

I don’t think it’s a surprise, therefore, that so many of the popular programs about Italian-American culture—including “The Sopranos” and “Jersey Shore”—often celebrate the more folkloric and popular aspects of their ancestors’ Italian lives, without going deeply into questions of how the immigrant Italian world relates to Italian history and culture outside of the south. As I write in My Two Italies, Italian-American culture is essentially southern Italian culture imported to the United States. Our southern Italian heritage is something to be celebrated. But I also think it would be interesting for Italian Americans to go beyond the usual pop-cultural clichés about the “Old Country” and ask ourselves what it means to be “Italian” in the context of the troubled relation between the Italian north and south, and how this relates to massively important Italian issues like its centuries-long political fragmentation and quest for a unifying language that stretches back to Dante.

Was there any particular event that prompted you to specialize in Italian studies?
It wasn’t so much a single event as a general awakening I experienced, a few years after college, pushing me in the direction of my parents’ world and all the memories it held. When I decided to get a Ph.D. in literature, there wasn’t any particularly compelling aspect of my background that suggested it should be in Italian. I hadn’t majored in Italian as an undergraduate, and though I did take a few courses in Italian as part of a Master’s program I had enrolled in before my doctorate, it was still an open question as to which path I would pursue. But when it came down to making a career decision, it became clear to me just how much sense it would make to combine my love for literature with the mysteries of the “two Italies” I had grown up with—the customs and traditions of my parents, with their alien acts like the blood pudding they made from pigs they slaughtered, and the dreams that Italy inspired in me, especially during the life-changing junior year abroad I had spent in Florence amid its Renaissance splendor. I didn’t know this at the time, but I was compelled along by a desire to reconcile these two worlds—to show how, for all their differences, they are still part of the same, single Italian culture.

My studies would in fact teach me that the Italian quest for a national tongue that obsessed such authors as Dante and Alessandro Manzoni also shaped the lives of immigrants like my father, who had to abandon his Calabrian dialect after immigrating to the United States, a move that would essentially make him a linguistic orphan (he lost Calabrian, never learned standard Italian, and could barely speak English). So the decision to specialize in Italian studies was one of those rare and wonderful instances where my heart and my head were in sync: rationally, I knew it would be wise to focus on a literary tradition that I both admired and had cultural roots in; emotionally, I felt pulled by my deep love for my parents and their lost homeland, and I wanted to dig into our family’s past and see just where the poetry of Dante and the blood puddings of my people could connect.

Do you ever feel that Italy—apart from its art—has little new to offer you?
Another very good, tough question. Obviously I love Italy, as I have made teaching and writing about it into my life’s work. I’m aware, however, that at times my connection to Italy has been affected by the experiences of my parents and the distance that they set between themselves and Calabria after emigrating from it in the late 1950s. For example, I’m often asked if I would want to apply for dual citizenship in Italy to go along with my American passport, and my answer has always been no, I would not. It’s very difficult for me to imagine myself as a citizen of any country beside the United States, including Italy, because I think of the incredible sacrifices that my parents had to endure to become American. They had to give up their Italian citizenship when they immigrated to the United States; more than that, they had to leave behind all their friends and families, basically their entire lives, so that we, their six children, could have a better life filled with more opportunities in America. And that has certainly been the case: just one generation after my father, who had only the slightest of a grade-school education, I was lucky enough to be able to go on and receive a doctorate. The idea, in a sense, of reversing the vector and reclaiming their lost, abandoned Italian citizenship seems somehow to do an injustice to all that my parents had to sacrifice.

Of course, I realize that one could argue just the exact opposite: by reclaiming the Italian citizenship my parents had lost, I would be restoring to our family a tie to Italy that my mother and father had been forced to sever. Perhaps. But it just doesn’t quite feel that way. . . . As I wrote in my book, my mom said something to me once that truly shocked me: my father, she said, had been happy in Calabria, even carefree. That is decidedly not the image of my overworked, overstressed father that I knew growing up. He and my mother had left a Calabria that, despite its poverty, was a relatively “happy and carefree” place for them, in order to build a new home on the other side of the world. Their journey has always seemed arduous, ferociously demanding, even cruel at times—and yet, more than anything, it has been a remarkable gift. Their gift to me, one that no child can ever repay, has been a life of boundless opportunity free from the hardships of Calabria.

I’ve been surprised by the evolution of My Two Italies. When I started writing it, I imagined it would be exclusively about Italy and Italian America. I now see that it is a book about la famiglia, the family, especially in its connection to the American experience and how profoundly linked that has been to immigration. I’m in awe of my parents’ courage and resolve in embracing immigration and all that it would take from them, and I hope that my book will honor their journey.

A portion of this article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a review of this book.

The voice behind the popular web series “Ask a Mortician” exposes the grisly, hilarious details of working in a crematorium—and argues that everyone needs to be more closely connected to the realities of death.

Your book is often vividly gruesome—and just as often very funny. What do you think is the source of your “gallows humor”?
My parents are both very clever people. I grew up around humor. It just made sense to apply it to conversations about death and mortality. Especially since these heavy topics can often be easier to take in if they’re delivered with a lighter touch.

You write that the day-to-day realities of working in a crematorium “were more savage than I had anticipated.” What surprised you most in your first days at the crematory?
The bodies were savage, in the sense that I had never seen so many corpses in one place. But the real savagery was that the corpses were essentially abandoned. Our funeral home came to pick them up and take them away from their families and store them in a giant freezer. I was the only person there when the bodies were cremated. Most people have no idea they can be much more involved in the death care of the people they love.

Your obsession with death began when you were 8 years old and saw a child plunge from an escalator in a shopping mall. Working in the mortuary seems to have brought some resolution to your obsession. Was writing the book also cathartic in some way?
Absolutely. Part of writing the book was to let other people know that we’re all obsessed with death, to a degree. Death is the human condition, and it’s perfectly OK to be fascinated by it, perfectly OK to want information about what goes on behind the scenes. It’s not morbid, or deviant, or wrong. In a way, writing the book helped me to fully embrace that idea as well.

You’re critical of the modern American funeral industry. But you are also critical of Jessica Mitford’s landmark exposé of funeral home practices, The American Way of Death (1963). What’s your beef with Mitford’s book?
I try to make it clear that I have a great deal of respect for what Mitford did. However, I think she was so focused on subverting the old men of the traditional funeral industry that the book ended up being pro-direct cremation. Direct cremation (cremation with no services of any kind) is the cheapest alternative, but it doesn’t allow for something I believe we need, which is to care for and interact with our dead bodies. To have the body just disappear can hurt the grieving process.

You’re on a kind of mission in Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. Why is it so important that people have a closer connection with death?
I am on a mission! I would never claim to be an objective reporter. Death affects everything we do as humans, and we’re much healthier when we understand this. Other than television and film, we never see death any more, it’s not a part of our daily lives. We view this as “progress” but I don’t believe it is. We need the reality of death to remind us that we are not immortal, and our actions have real consequences.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Richard Blanco first became widely known when he was selected to write a poem for Barack Obama’s second presidential inauguration in 2012. Blanco, who was working as a civil engineer and writing poetry on the side, had been born in Madrid to Cuban immigrant parents and come to the U.S. as a child, eventually settling with his extended family in Miami. His selection as the inaugural poet marked a number of firsts: He was the first Latino, first immigrant and first openly gay writer chosen for the role.

In an alternately hilarious and moving new memoir, The Prince of los Cocuyos, Blanco looks back on his childhood in Miami: his close family, his domineering grandmother, his struggle to be a "real" American (one who ate Easy Cheese and went to Disney World) and his conflicted feelings about his emerging sexuality.

We caught up with Blanco at the 2014 Southern Festival of Books to find out more his fresh and vivid portrayal of "becoming."

First I’d like to ask about the title of the book. What is the significance of it and why did you choose it?
There are two reasons. “El Cocuyito” is the name of my granduncle’s Cuban grocery store, where I started working when I was 12. And it’s the proverbial village where, as I like to say, I learned to be Cuban, learned to fall in love with my Cuban heritage and really learn about it beyond the nostalgia and beyond the misconceptions I had about where I was from. So the grocery store plays a big role in the book, and the “prince” idea relates to the idea of the village, which raised me in a way. And the cocuyos are fireflies, so of course there’s the magic of that. They’re lightning bugs, and like every kid I used to trap them in jars.

Did your publisher give you any pushback on using Spanish words in the title?
Not at all.  I was very surprised because it’s something I’ve always heard is met with horror—a bilingual title. But they didn’t blink. They loved it. And I knew it was a chance, but I also feel like it’s time. We obviously have text that’s in Spanish and English; this has become commonplace. But it’s interesting how few Latino authors dare to put Spanish in a title. I wanted to take the dare. And cocuyos is just a funky, cool, kooky word and in some ways, the fun part is people trying to pronounce it.

On a related question, I noticed that you mostly don’t translate the Spanish words that you use in the memoir. What was your thinking behind that?
It’s really annoying to translate everything that someone says in Spanish. When you use Spanish in a text, it’s not just for meaning but for sound. But I always try to set it up contextually, so that you’re never lost, or translate it in context, which is the real challenge of writing in that way. I don’t have a choice because my family and my community—I don’t hear them in English, I hear them in Spanish. And so the compromise is to have some English and some Spanish.

Why did you decide to write a memoir, to translate your experiences “not into poetry but into prose”?
I actually started this project about four years ago. Part of it, at first, was just creative curiosity and wanting to see how it is that prose worked. And I was also driven by a sense that every genre has its limitations—its strengths and its weaknesses. There were so many stories that I still wanted to tell and unpack from the poetry. And you can’t really do that kind of broad characterization in a poem—characters like my mother and my grandmother. My poems are narrative so they’re story-like, but of course, even that has its limitations.

Part of what I learned is that poetry is super-compressed; it’s about the emotional core of people in a situation. And writing in prose is more about storytelling, and that’s fun too. I always had to be cautious about not going down the poetry wormhole, and going on for three pages describing the sofa. It was interesting to challenge myself to adhere to a narrative, to try to construct a narrative out of pieces of memory. And that was fascinating. I also learned by contrast more of what poetry is all about—by working in another genre.

Was there anything in your personal life that you struggled with whether to reveal?
Yes and no. Part of it is that I’m insulated by language. A lot of the elders in my community and in my family have a working knowledge of English but they wouldn’t read a whole book of mine in English. For that matter, they wouldn’t read a whole book of poetry. So I’ve always had a little bit of a barrier, a little bit of a cushion, so to speak.

I don’t know if I could have written this book if my grandmother were still alive. I think everything happens the way it’s supposed to happen. But then again, the book is not about family scandal or gossip. Part of why I like to tell stories is to, in a sense, revere and honor my community. And so there’s always a tone of love and honesty in my work, even though the memoir gets a little more dangerous (laughter).

You mentioned your grandmother, who is such a big part of your story. You write that this book let you “hate her, understand her, forgive her, and thank her.” How do you think she would react to your characterization of her, and would she understand you better if she were able to read it?
I think she would understand more of what I was going through. As an adult, you sometimes treat children as adults and you don’t realize that the words coming out of your mouth are 10 times more significant when you’re 7 years old than when you’re 17 or 27.

Part of what I hope the book will do is to let people like my grandmother or parents of gay teenagers understand the psychology of what a gay youth goes through—it’s a very subtle and slow process and you can’t come out until you’re ready to come out. There’s a series of all sorts of negotiations and translations of yourself that you need to go through. And I think my grandmother would understand that a hell of a lot better.

But also, by analyzing it, I now better understand where she was coming from. It’s a different brand of homophobia we’re dealing with, at least in my particular Cuban culture, and I think, perhaps, Latin American culture in general. The idea is not that being gay is an evil thing and you’re going to hell, the crime is really about being effeminate. So what my grandmother was trying to do was to say, “I know who you are, but here’s what we’re going to do.” Because in an odd, twisted way, she was experienced in that generation and culture, and she was preparing me: Be what you need to be, but … pass. The idea was that you behaved like a man regardless of what your sexuality was. You know, machismo, it’s a more important layer than all the rest.

You’re often asked about poets who have influenced you. Now that you’re a memoirist, I’d like to find out if there are memoirs that you especially admire.
Obviously, I read Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana. I thought it was wonderful, of course, but it was another layer of the story. It gave me something to build off of, so to speak. His experience of actually having memories of Cuba was different from my own, because I wasn’t born there. But I feel like I do have [memories of Cuba] at times, because the photographs become so real.

And then, Augusten Burroughs. At one time, as a working title, I would call my book Running with Mangoes. And he ended up doing a blurb for my book, and I think that’s what convinced him. Certainly it’s not the same story, but it has that bizarre, kooky, what-am-I-doing-here kind of feeling. And having come out the other end a much better person for it—I think it shared that. It resonated emotionally with me as well.

And there’s also Richard Hoffman’s memoir, Half the House. The inspiration comes from many sources.

You’ve been promoting The Prince of los Cocuyos for a couple of weeks now. Is there anything you’ve found especially gratifying or surprising about the way readers are reacting to the book?
I’m finding little pieces of the memoir that I never thought would be such a connecting point, like the Easy Cheese. At a reading in Brookline, a man brought me a gift. As soon as I held it in my hands, I knew what it was—three cans of Easy Cheese. I’m still munching on them. Those are the moments that, as a writer, always surprise you—what people connect with.

On the other hand, I have also been surprised by just how connected people still are to the inauguration and my role in that as a poet. It seems like something that will go on for my lifetime, and happily so.

How does your personal coming-of-age story mirror or represent the larger story of America?
The story of “becoming” is primordial; it’s trans-cultural. It doesn’t matter if you’re gay or straight, 50 or 15, we’re always becoming. There’s always a sense of transforming. It’s a fundamental part of the human psyche. We’re never really fully there. Just when you think you’ve got it all done, you have . . . grandchildren. The “you” is always this mirage just down the road, and when you get to it, it slips away from you. You’re kind of following yourself all your life to become who you already are.

I’ve been thinking about this idea of becoming, and in the process of my experience serving as inaugural poet, and if you look at a country, it also has an evolution, and a sense of its own becoming. And America right now is about 13. As a country, we’re young, and we’re still asking all these questions, just like little Riqui is asking in this memoir. Who are we? We’re having all these conversations about labels. Do we use labels? Do we not use labels? Nobody knows the answer.

I find that America is also, as a people, coming of age. We are becoming and deciding. We tend to be very impatient in our causes and the things that we want to see changed. And we think that the story begins and ends in our lifetimes. But the story of America will continue far beyond our lifetimes. And just because we haven’t reached what you thought was the end of the story, you have to realize that all you’re doing is adding a sentence, a word, a paragraph, and that the story continues. We’re not there yet, but that’s not the point. The point is, hopefully, as a democracy, we continue to “raise” this country, we continue to “rear” this country. Some days we go two steps back, some days two steps forward, depending on what side of the fence you’re looking at it from.

The idea of becoming is such an American idea that it parallels very much the personal stories of coming of age. If you really think about it, the questions I was asking as a child are in some ways the same questions that Whitman was asking not too long ago. Who are we? Who are we as a country? Do we distinguish ourselves or do we just blend? Is there a right thing to do? Is the ultimate aim of diversity to be un-diverse? What do we call “American”? We don’t know yet. We’re still a teenager, rambling about and figuring things out.

I love reviewing memoirs for BookPage. I read them all: memoirs about surviving dysfunctional families, surviving addiction, surviving in the wilderness—as well as the odd celebrity tell-all (surviving fame?). So I was especially excited for Kevin Sessums' I Left It On the Mountain, the follow-up to his best-selling 2007 memoir Mississippi Sissy. Quirky and raw, Sessums’ new memoir has all my favorite survival themes, plus cameos from Hugh Jackman and Courtney Love. I adored I Left It On The Mountain and, after reviewing the book, I posed a few follow-up questions to Sessums, which he thoughtfully answered for BookPage.

Walking as a healing practice structures much of your book: from Jessica Lange’s thoughts on walking, to your own journeys up Mt. Kilimanjaro and along the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. Why is walking emotionally and spiritually healing, do you think? Do you continue to walk now?
I have come to believe in the power of walking meditation. I'm not sure why it works for me. I just know there comes a moment on any long walk when the landscape through which you're walking combines with some sort of interior one and you feel connected with the world and not of it at the same time. All truths are finally incongruous, aren't they? So it is in that moment when I feel more tethered to the earthly world in which we all live and at the same time freed of it. I often tell people that during that walk on the Camino that I have never felt such stillness while at the same time experiencing such forward motion. Life, let's face it, is so often a trudge. We might as well learn how to trust the trudge, I guess. 

"I have found in my recovery that all the impulses that led me to addiction are still there. The difference is that I no longer act on them."

I love the bits of spiritual revelation you get from celebrities like Hugh Jackman, Jessica Lange, Madonna and Courtney Love. Your interviews with them seem to go much deeper than ordinary celebrity journalism. Why do you think this is?
Maybe because I don't sit in judgment of the celebrities. Some people accuse me of writing puff pieces. I tend to think of them as impertinent ones though. I think the people you mention all like a bit of impertinence. Maybe that impertinence on my part opened them up. If I drove a car, this would be my bumper sticker: NEVER JUDGMENTAL, ALWAYS DISCERNING. So discernment plays a part in it as well. 

You talk about the comfort of the “nest” when an interview with a celebrity turns into a real conversation. How do you feel about being interviewed yourself?
I'm much more comfortable posing the questions than forming the answers. I sometimes try to be too pithy in my responses. Was mentioning pithiness too pithy?

One of the most moving images in the book is you as a child safe in bed on a snowy night with your father, mother and two dogs Coco and Chico. How have your dogs now—Archie and Teddy—changed your life?
Archie and Teddy have more than changed my life. They saved it. I love them unconditionally and they have proven to me that I can love another living creature in such a way. I often say I've become the cliché—an old gay man with two small dogs. But there is comfort in clichés. And just on a practical level, since they've entered my life and curl up next to me at night to sleep, I've never had to take another sleeping pill. Dogs have it figured out: All they want is for someone to love them, feed them and deal with their shit. Indeed, if someone from another planet happened here and saw the relationship between dogs and those who care for them they would think that dogs run the planet. Because they do. 

I was struck by your relationship with Brandon, the child you mentored through The Family Center. What has that relationship taught you? How is Brandon doing?
It has taught me some rough lessons about how hard it is too get kids out of generational poverty. But it has also taught me on a personal level the importance of intimacy that has nothing to do with sexuality. Brandon went through a rough patch—that's his story to tell—but we are still in each other's lives 13 years after I first met him when he was seven years old. I love the young man. He's got a beautiful, smart girlfriend and is trying really hard to make his way in the world. I wasn't really there for him during the darkest days of my addiction and I am so grateful that our relationship has remained intact now during my recovery and I can be there again for him when he needs me. He's no longer a child so it's a bit different. I can be a bit tougher in my advice now.

How does a Methodist make sense of the miracles you experienced on the Camino de Santiago? I’m especially thinking of your visitation by the “Jim Morrison” ghost.
The only way to make sense of them is to give up being a Methodist. That was one of the most surprising aspects of my experience on the Camino. I embarked on that most Catholic of spiritual paths as a Protestant and ended it not as an atheist but as a theist. I no longer call myself a Christian. That is a big step for me—as much a cultural one as a spiritual one. But I tend to live my life in that mysterious space between the "a" and the "t." And in that space there is enough room for a Jim Morrison ghost to appear. It is not about explanations, I've discovered, but acceptance and surrender. That is not only the way I have stayed sober, but the way I . . . well . . . trudge forth in my spiritual journey as well. 

The path to healing and forgiveness does not run smoothly for you. It seems like big visionary moments such as you experience on Kilimanjaro and the Camino de Santiago are followed up by descents into scarier and deeper webs of addiction. How do you understand the “one step forward, three steps back” pace of recovery?
I think I've tried to explain in the book—by quite pointedly giving the devil his due—that we are all combinations of light and dark and, instead of denying all those impulses, we must own them. We must find a way to harmonize them without doing harm. I have found in my recovery that all the impulses that led me to addiction are still there. The difference is that I no longer act on them. But they are still a part of me. Another journalist was asking me a few months ago to try to explain the impulse that makes one an addict. Was it the survivor guilt of being a gay man of a certain age who did not die of AIDS? Was it some sort of other midlife crisis or a manifestation of some sort of deep-seated shame? I tried to explain that I leave the explanations up to others. I simply came to a moment of grace when I didn't need explanations but acceptance and surrender. I am an addict. I don't really need to know why. The need to know why was lifted along with the need to use. 

You take the poet Keats’ letters and poems with you on the Camino and eventually make your own pilgrimage to his resting place in Rome. Why is Keats so resonant for you?
I've always found him a romantic figure, not just a Romantic one. His early death. His own soul searching. And the love his shared with his close friend Joseph Severn I find enticing and alluring.

The visions and hallucinations you experience in the latter phases of addiction are explicitly mystic, and introduce you to Hindu deities like Ganesha, the elephant-headed God, and his mother Parvati. You also experience more frightening, Luciferian visions. This is a question one could write books about, but how do you understand the relationship between mysticism and drug use? Can they be disentangled?
I know this part of the book will trouble some people. Other will perhaps be moved by it. It might be controversial. So be it. Honestly, I thought my editor would insist I cut these sections or tone them down but he allowed me to keep them all in. I hope I have written these sections with the clarity they deserve even without understanding all that happened to me and what I describe myself. I don't know if what I experienced is real, but it certainly is true.
I'll leave it to each reader to discern his or her own truth regarding it. Sorry to repeat myself but I hope they will not be judgmental about these passages but discerning. Some would describe what I went through as part of a drug psychosis. Others would say they were hallucinations. I tend to see them as manifestations. This memoir itself is, in its way, the final manifestation of it all.

Catherine Hollis is a teacher and writer in Oakland, California.

Photo by Matt Edge.

Clad in Starfleet regulation red and black, Kate Mulgrew helmed the USS Voyager for seven seasons as Captain Kathryn Janeway in “Star Trek: Voyager.” In the hit series “Orange Is the New Black” she co-stars as take-no-guff Galina “Red” Reznikov, who shrewdly navigates the echelons of a minimum security federal women’s prison. Now, Mulgrew proves equally commanding as a storyteller—with a new memoir that is equal parts triumph and heartbreak. 

The tellingly titled Born with Teeth is no cookie-cutter career chronicle. Yes, Mulgrew mentions the more notable film, TV and stage projects of her 40-year career. And there is occasional name-dropping. (A boozy Richard Burton, with whom she is co-starring in an Arthurian romance, tells her to “Get. Out.” Get out of what, she wonders? He replies, “This business will kill you. . . .”) But the book’s emphasis is on family and friendships, along with the actress’ own indomitable spirit, which is a hallmark of the characters she’s known for portraying. 

“If there is an arc to my life it is that wherever there is light, there is shadow,” Mulgrew says.

Speaking by phone from her Manhattan apartment, just days after recording the audio version of Born with Teeth, she describes what it was like to read her own words: “It was an existential, revelatory, bizarre, but strangely exhausting and moving experience. I encouraged the director and the engineer to keep rolling through it. Because if there were tears or a huskiness in my voice or an unexplained pause, the audience would certainly understand, and I think it endows it with an authenticity.”

The going was particularly difficult when it came to the passages about her beloved younger sister, Tessie, who died of a brain tumor. And then there were the sections about an early-in-her-career unplanned pregnancy and the decision to give the baby up for adoption. 

“My own life—and I realize I’m at risk of sounding arrogant, but I assure you this is not intended that way—has surpassed, in richness, size and depth, anything that I have lived as an actress,” Mulgrew says. “The people that I’ve loved, the losses that I’ve experienced. . . . My upbringing alone was extraordinary.”

The eldest daughter of a loud, boisterous, unconventional Irish-Catholic family, Mulgrew grew up in a rambling house in Dubuque, Iowa, where she was mother hen to her six siblings (a seventh died in infancy), and the best friend and confidante to her mother, Joan, whose own dashed artistic dreams propelled her to urge Kate toward success.

A pivotal moment came when the young Mulgrew became transfixed by both writing and the theater. “You can either be a mediocre poet or a great actress,” said her mother.

Looking back at that exchange, Mulgrew, on the cusp of turning 60, says, “I was to complete her incomplete journey. At the time I couldn’t have understood that she needed to live through me, vicariously.”

It was after making her way to New York University, and into the acting program taught by the legendary Stella Adler, that Mulgrew encountered another defining figure. “Stella unleashed in me the things that allowed me to become who I did become. My mother had the map. She understood the road. But Stella knew the way.” 

Mulgrew was just 19 when she was cast in a new daytime soap, “Ryan’s Hope,” and as Emily Webb in the Broadway revival of the Thornton Wilder perennial, Our Town. “I spent my days in the studio, my nights on the stage. I knew that I would never be this happy again in my life. Or feel so exhausted. Or joyful.” Adds Mulgrew, “I was elated. I was alive. I was unfettered and I was free.” Then came the unplanned pregnancy. 

The soap opera star lived a soap opera of her own. A pregnancy was written into “Ryan’s Hope,” and Mulgrew made arrangements with a Catholic adoption agency.

After giving birth, she wasn’t allowed to hold her baby daughter—though a hospital nurse allowed her one quick peek at Baby Girl Mulgrew before closing the Venetian blinds that shielded the newborns from onlookers. Three days later Mulgrew was back at work—where the script called for her character to cradle a stunt baby.   

Mulgrew subsequently moved from daytime to primetime TV as the title character in “Mrs. Columbo,” and starred in sweeping miniseries like “The Manions of America,” which introduced viewers to a handsome Irishman named Pierce Brosnan. There were movies, too, and lots of stage work. And romances and marriage and motherhood (two sons). And divorce. Through it all, Mulgrew agonized about the daughter she had given up. When queries to the adoption agency were ignored, she hired an investigator.

When, in 1998, Mulgrew was at last put in touch with her daughter, Danielle, and asked for an in-person meeting, the young woman said, “I’ll have to ask my parents first.” Today, birth mother and daughter are close. (“She’s coming in this weekend,” Mulgrew notes.) Danielle was given an advance galley of Mulgrew’s book—as were a handful of close friends, siblings and Mulgrew’s soulmate—husband Tim Hagan. (The memoir chronicles Mulgrew’s romance with Hagan, an Ohio politician.)

Mulgrew wrote Born with Teeth over a year-long period without the usual co-author (or ghostwriter). “Writing is different than acting, but it’s the same longing. It’s tapping into the same primitive place.”

This article was originally published in the April 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

UPDATE: Mulgrew has confirmed in an interview posted on her website that she is now divorced from husband Tim Hagan.

Although Paul Kalanithi dreamed of becoming a writer, he first planned to spend 20 years as a neurosurgeon-scientist. Tragically, however, in 2013—during his last year of residency at Stanford—the nonsmoking 36-year-old was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. 

Soon after, he wrote a powerful New York Times op-ed piece, “How Long Have I Got Left?,” describing his diagnosis and struggle to make the best use of his remaining time. “Tell me three months,” he wrote, “I’d just spend time with family. Tell me one year, I’d have a plan (write that book). Give me 10 years, I’d get back to treating diseases.”

In the months before his death in March 2015, Paul managed to do all three. He received treatment, continued to perform surgery as long as feasible, spent precious moments with his wife and family, became a father for the first time, and wrote a thought-provoking memoir about his life, illness and mortality, When Breath Becomes Air.

“He was working really hard,” recalls his widow, Lucy Kalanithi, a Stanford internist who met Paul while the two were in medical school at Yale. “He was suffering physically and of course emotionally. But he was very, very tough and thoughtful, and somehow coped and kept going.”

She describes her husband as “unbelievably smart, and, to top it off, the funniest person I’ve ever met, while at the same time, soft-spoken and subtle.” The couple often sat or lay side by side during his illness and Lucy’s maternity leave, with Lucy sometimes reading Paul’s words as he wrote. His manuscript afforded the couple a natural opportunity to communicate about what was happening and how Paul was feeling.

“It was exhausting, but we were having a really good time,” Lucy says. “It was very purposeful; we loved each other and we loved Cady [their daughter]. We knew that Paul’s time was limited and we were in pain . . .  but it was kind of an amazing time. It’s a weird word to use, but also very fun.”

Lucy notes that her husband was “uniquely positioned” to write this book, and that she, as a physician, was also uniquely positioned to help take care of him, along with their families and friends.

“And it still took everything I had,” she says. 

In the book’s foreword, Stanford physician and author Abraham Verghese aptly describes Paul’s writing as “stunning” and “unforgettable,” noting: “See what courage sounds like. See how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way. But above all, see what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after you are gone, by your words.”

Paul thought deeply before he wrote, and then his words flowed; his wife recalls that he wrote his op-ed piece during an airplane flight. “He wrote very quickly,” Lucy explains, “and didn’t spend a lot of time going back over it, partly because he didn’t have a lot of time and he knew it. Literally, he was racing to finish.” 

The beauty of his prose is hardly a coincidence, because Paul earned graduate degrees in English, history and philosophy before turning to medicine. Early in the book he declares, “I knew with certainty that I would never be a doctor.” Pages later, he eloquently traces his unforeseen career trajectory, explaining, “I realized that the questions intersecting life, death, and meaning, questions that all people face at some point, usually arise in a medical context.” 

Paul didn’t expect to face his own intersection so soon. Summing up his transformation from physician to patient, he writes: “Shouldn’t terminal illness, then, be the perfect gift to that young man who had wanted to understand death? What better way to understand it than to live it? But I’d had no idea how hard it would be, how much terrain I would have to explore, map, settle. I’d always imagined the doctor’s work as something like connecting two pieces of railroad track, allowing a smooth journey for the patient. I hadn’t expected the prospect of facing my own mortality to be so disorienting, so dislocating.”

The book was nearly complete when Paul died. “One of the last things he said to me was ‘Please get this finished,’ ” Lucy remembers. She explains that all the words in the book are his: His editor occasionally supplemented his manuscript with passages written elsewhere in essays, his book proposal and lengthy emails to friends. 

Lucy also penned a powerful epilogue describing Paul’s last days in a sad but elegant coda to the book. “I’m not at all a writer like Paul was,” she admits. “But writing that epilogue—I just loved it. It was the most meaningful thing I’ve ever written.”

As she works part time at Stanford (planning to return full time in March), Lucy finds the grief process to be “unexpected and unpredictable.” She rejoices in every milestone of their daughter Cady’s life. “Paul would have loved that her first word was ‘dog,’ ” she says. “There are all these little things that are just so bittersweet because he’s not here.”

When Breath Becomes Air closes with Paul’s heartbreakingly beautiful words to Cady, who brought him so much happiness during his dying days. “I’m so happy that he wrote it for her,” Lucy says. “That passage is my prized possession. I haven’t memorized it. I didn’t even try. I’ve just read it so many times.”

In the midst of her grief, Lucy remains excited about the book’s publication. “I’m keeping a promise that I made to Paul, which feels really important and makes me feel purposeful.” 

“I’m very happy about sharing him with the world,” she adds. “This book will be on people’s bookshelves. I can’t believe it. Paul really wanted to be a writer. We worked so hard to make it happen.”

Nonetheless, she can’t help but lament: “I’d give anything for you to be talking to Paul rather than me.”

Editor's note: This article has been updated to correct the date of Paul Kalanithi's death.

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

There were many surprises in store when you inherited your father’s desk and 1,800 pounds of his writing. Of the more than 400 novels he wrote, most were pulp porn. Were you aware of this as a child? What did you know about his writing career then?
Dad was a salesman who wrote at night and on weekends. He got a few stories in print, then, when I was 12, he published his first novel. My understanding was that he wrote only science fiction. He kept his porn activity very secret. This was mainly due to living in a very conservative area—the Bible Belt of Appalachia.

By the time I was 16, I realized he wrote some porn. But I believed it was supplemental income, a little bit here and there to make ends meet. It wasn’t until his death that I fully understood the scope of his output, and the primary focus on porn.

As the oldest child of four, you ended up taking care of your siblings while your mother defaulted to taking care of your father’s needs. Do your younger siblings view your father very differently from you?
I’m the oldest by a few years, and took care of them extensively. Dad was always in the house, so it wasn’t a case of a physically absent father. But he worked nonstop.

As a kid, I occupied both a parental role and a big brother role. Later, after we’d all left home, this influenced our relationships as adults. They gave me more authority than I wanted or deserved. Sometimes they wanted approval from me that they didn’t get from Dad. They could also be angry with me because it was safer than getting mad at Dad.

These days, we are all still trying to work through this—not Dad’s death so much, but who we are now. All I really want to be is the “big brother.” But that may not be possible, since I still have more responsibility—for my mother and for Dad’s literary estate.

Apparently your mother typed up your father’s manuscripts for him. Do you think she ever made any editorial changes while typing them?
Yes. She corrected any surface errors and deciphered his handwritten edits. Mom was a good typist, much better than Dad. He taught himself to type with three fingers and made many errors.

Due to the sheer volume and the pace that he worked, Mom worked on some books in a more collaborative role. They worked together very fast: Dad wrote a first draft in longhand, then began typing. He’d get 30 or so pages and pass it on to Mom for the final draft. As a result, she made some changes—for clarity, structure and details. Sometimes she did the final typing while he was still finishing the book!

Your father earned a decent living from writing pornography (at least enough to pay for orthodontia), and as you say in the book, “died in harness,” as a professional writer—he kept writing until his end. You yourself have found success both in literary fiction and as a screenwriter. What traits as a writer (if any) did you inherit from him?
It’s difficult to know what was inherited and what was modeled in terms of behavior. I certainly inherited his love of reading, which is crucial for a writer. I have his curiosity and energy. Perhaps most important, I learned the value of discipline—treating the act of writing like a job. Like Dad, I write every day. Unlike him, I revise very heavily. He was much more prolific.

His father, my grandfather, was a failed writer. So maybe there is some genetic component. I didn’t want to be a writer because it meant admitting I was like my father. But at a certain point in my early 20s, I really had no choice. I wrote all the time.

You were a passionate reader as a child, and Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy was a particular favorite. I’ve known many women writers to claim Harriet as a role model, but not male writers. What did you learn from Harriet?
Harriet’s gender didn’t matter as much as her circumstances and behavior. Her parents were busy and she was on her own most of the time. Harriet was a loner who walked around recording her observations in a notebook. She dressed like I did—jeans, long sleeves and sneakers. She often carried a flashlight and tools, as I did. Harriet had a strength and confidence that I admired. What I learned from the book was the value of recording thoughts on paper. I resolved always to carry paper and pen. I still do.

You speak of your deep affection for the land you grew up in—the wooded hills of Appalachia. Why do you think lonely, imaginative children attach so strongly to the natural world?
I can’t speak for other children, but in my case it was simple—the natural world was stunningly gorgeous and very safe. I never felt afraid or alone in the woods.

I believe that spending so much time alone in the woods sharpened my perceptions. You have to rely more on sound and smell, and careful observation, to not get lost or scared. Essentially, I learned to see in the woods—to see things as they are, not what I’d like them to be. The natural world doesn’t lie. There’s no hidden agenda or clever marketing. Nature is brutal and relentless and beautiful. Perhaps that’s why I don’t waste time on small talk.

My question is this: Why don’t more people form attachments to the natural world?

It’s hard to process the death of a difficult parent. You write of loving your father, but not liking him. Can you speak to the difference?
Babies are born with an impulse to love. They love whoever is around, especially their caretakers. It’s a natural drive that benefits humanity. Then kids grow and become adults. Some realize they don’t actually like their father or their mother or their siblings. But they still love them. Love doesn’t have an off-switch.

My father could be very funny and extremely charismatic. He was extremely likeable for short periods, but people had to interact with Dad on his terms or not at all. I loved him the way any boy loves his father. But Dad made himself very hard to like. He preferred not to be close with most people other than my mother. I believe it made him feel safe.

As with many people, he was easier to love at a distance than to like close up.

It was emotionally wrenching for you to organize and catalog your father’s literary output, so much so that your siblings suggested that you burn his papers instead. In the end, are you glad you completed the task?
Yes. I learned a lot about myself in the process of writing the book. I was also able to understand my father better. When I finished, I felt relieved. It was exhausting in every way—physically, mentally and emotionally. Two years went by, and my memory of that time is vague. I worked 12 hours a day. I read tens of thousands of pages of his work. I eventually cut 200 pages from the final manuscript. I’m not fully certain what is in the book and what is not. I don’t even know what it’s about. Dad, I guess.

Writing this book had short-term effects, some of which weren’t good. I’m very interested in learning the long-term effects a few years from now. What benefits will arise from having devoted myself to this book? At this point, I believe I’m a better person for having done so.

RELATED CONTENT:  Read our review of My Father, the Pornographer.

This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.