Richard Russo

Richard Russo's new memoir is Elsewhere.

From his Q & A with Irene Lacher at The Los Angeles Times:

Why your first memoir now?

In a sense I would have preferred that it be never. I'm a perfectly happy novelist. I love to invent things. But in the months after my mother's death, which was about five years ago, she was very much on my mind and also visiting my dreams as well, which made it feel to me like maybe there was unfinished business there.

I think that this book is in a way connected to my novels, especially the last couple, because "Empire Falls" and "Bridge of Sighs" are both about people who are pushing 60 pretty hard and wondering, how in the world did I come to be here? [In "Empire Falls,] Miles Roby has this profound sense of his mother's dream for him, and he imagines this other life where he is a learned man if only he had finished college the way she wanted him to and become some sort of teacher or professor, that he would have fulfilled her dream. In "Bridge of Sighs," Lucy Lynch, who never leaves his hometown, wonders, how is it that life turned out this way? What was it in my genetic makeup, what were the choices that I made?

And in the months after my mother's death, I found myself...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue