Brooke Davis
Brooke Davis is the author of the novel Lost & Found. From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: Of your three main characters, one is very young and two are elderly. What role do you see age playing in the novel?--Marshal Zeringue
A: When I first started writing the book, I think it was about self-preservation: I found it difficult to write about things from my own point of view because it felt too close. I wanted to keep a distance so I could have time to work out how I felt.
This eventually evolved into the feeling that I wanted to represent grief as a thing that we all deal with differently. I felt like I couldn’t do that from my own singular point of view; that it required the freedom of both fiction and multiple points of view.
The very young and the very old also have these really interesting positions within Western culture—there’s an invisibility to them. They’re not really heard.
The very young are constructed as being pre-social-awareness, and the very old as the opposite but exactly the same, a kind of post-social-awareness. And the idea of tackling a subject we struggle to talk about like death via characters who aren’t listened to—it was a very compelling idea to me. It made sense.
There was such a sense of freedom in writing from their point of view—I was able to ask those real thorny questions about The Way Things Are that I was afraid to...[read on]
