Then on Tuesday, June 5, I’ll be introducing everyone who swings by the Downtown Stage at 11:00 a.m. to four of the authors of this year’s buzz titles: novelists Antoine Wilson, Rachel Joyce, and Vaddey Ratner, plus memoirist Susannah Cahalan. This is rather a short session, so I’m planning on staying out of the way and letting these writers tell you about the books they’ve got coming out later this year, and why you should keep an eye out for them. (I’m starting to get my advance copies in the mail, and I’m looking forward to digging into them next week!)

Oh! And on Monday night, you should totally swing by Lady Jane’s Salon, the monthly reading series dedicated to romance fiction I helped launch three-and-a-half years ago. Our guests that evening are Cara Elliot, Taryn Rose, Mari Mancusi, Diana Peterfreund, and Beatriz Williams—and we’re hoping that a lot of romance fans who are coming to New York City for the BookExpo will drop by and introduce themselves! At the end of the year, the net proceeds from our $5 cover are donated to a local women’s charity, so you’ll be supporting a good cause as well as having a good time.

Then, of course, there’s all the wandering around the Javits Convention Center I’m likely to do while BookExpo is in full swing: catching up with publishers from outside New York, taking notes at industry panels, standing in line to get autographed books… If there’s any decent cell-phone reception, which is unfortunately never a given at the Javits, I’ll be tweeting some highlights, so keep an eye out!

Jefferson Bass is known for “his” crime thrillers centered around the Body Farm, an anthropology research facility where forensic techniques are used to unlock the secrets a corpse contains about… well, how it became a corpse. I say “his” because, in reality, the novels are co-written by Dr. Bill Bass, the founder of the real life Body Farm, and Jon Jefferson, a journalist and novelist. Their latest collaboration, The Inquisitor’s Key, is quite a change of pace—oh, there’s still plenty of forensic science, but this time it’s being used to determine whether an skeleton uncovered in a former papal estate might be Jesus. (Actually, some alternative theories come up early in the game, especially interesting if you know your 14th-century theological history…) Though the skeleton is fictional, the novel does connect it to a real religious relic—at the very least, “real” in the sense that, whatever you think about its origins or properties, it’s a thing that exists. And Jon Jefferson kindly elaborates on its role in the story…

I write forensic fiction—crime novels that revolve around high-tech forensic science (especially forensic anthropology—the stuff of the hit TV show Bones). While researching and writing The Inquisitor’s Key, which is set in Avignon, France—the home of the popes for most of the 14th century—I found myself peering through the lens of science at the world’s most famous religious relic: the Shroud of Turin. The Shroud is a 14-foot strip of ivory-colored linen imprinted with a faint, reddish-brown image that appears to be the bloodstained form of a crucified man. Revered by millions as the burial cloth of Jesus, the Shroud thickens the novel’s plot when it’s linked to a mysterious skeleton, one that our 21st-century anthropologists unearth in Avignon’s 14th-century Palace of the Popes.

The Shroud of Turin made its first indisputable appearance in 1357—not in Turin, Italy, but in Lirey, France, a town due north of Avignon. It’s Christendom’s most famous relic, but it’s far from the only one. The Middle Ages were the heyday of religious relics: artifacts (often human bones and body parts) intended to inspire devotion—and to draw pilgrims to the churches that possessed them. The relics trade was brisk and bogus-laden. A very incomplete list of medieval relics includes two heads of John the Baptist; three corpses of Mary Magdalene; six (count ‘em, six) foreskins from the circumcised penis of the baby Jesus; vials of Jesus’s tears (and Mary’s breast milk!); 30 “holy nails” used in the crucifixion; and enough wood from the True Cross to build a small armada.

Unique among relics, the Shroud seems unfazed by modern skepticism and science; in fact, it actually seems to thrive on them. This “odd couple”—relic and science—first met in 1898, when a photographic negative of the Shroud revealed an eerie black-and-white face. The negative was far more dramatic and lifelike than the faint image on the cloth itself, and that raises an interesting question: Was that 1898 negative high-tech proof of an age-old miracle? Or was it a primitive precursor to Photoshop: an image-processing tool that had retouched reality in a powerful way?

The Shroud is no newcomer to controversy. In the 14th century, a French bishop wrote the pope in Avignon to warn him that the relic was a cunning fake. And the Vatican itself has carefully sidestepped the question of the Shroud’s authenticity. But ever since that first photographic negative, believers (including some scientists) have sought more high-tech proof of the Shroud’s miraculous nature.

The Inquisitor’s Key (including the part about a link between the Shroud and a skeleton in Avignon) is fiction. But the book does recap the real-life science that’s been applied to the Shroud, including a compelling hypothesis by forensic anthropologist Dr. Emily Craig (which she discusses in an article available as a PDF).

I don’t expect the novel to settle the centuries-old debate about the Shroud’s authenticity. And maybe that’s just as well. Maybe, by provoking thought and discussion about faith and science—about the miraculous and the mundane—the Shroud is doing exactly what its creator intended.

A while back, I mentioned Eric Orner’s art for his brother Peter’s novel, Love and Shame and Love. Recently, I saw a galley of Andrew Goldstein’s The Bookie’s Son, which also has drawings throughout the novel. In the acknowledgments, he mentions that these drawings are also a family affair, and I thought some of y’all might be interested in hearing about that, so I got in touch with his publicist and asked what he could tell us…

The other day, I was on the phone with a young woman at Book Baby and she said she loved the illustrations in The Bookie’s Son. She repeated this again later, which made me feel good since my daughter Lucy had drawn them. My original idea was to use real photos of my family even though the story is a fictional version of my childhood. I like the idea of mixing fact and fiction, memoir and novel, but at some point I chickened out. I decided that it might be too confusing for the reader, though I did use a real photo of my parents for the cover, which my son Max designed.

I use the illustrations at the beginning of each chapter. They are simple line drawings that were once more common in novels. The illustrations of people are based on family photos; there are also some drawings of physical objects and one racehorse. I debated the decision to use illustrations because one could argue that it is better for the reader to form their own impressions of what the main characters look like. I respect that perspective but in the end, for this novel, I decided the images added to the content.

During earlier drafts I had chapter headings, which I liked, but were unnecessary once I added the illustrations. The images do not always reflect the central theme or main character in the chapter. They serve more to convey a mood or hint at a person or action. One of their main functions is simply to be evocative without overshadowing the writing.

Two pleasant surprises: On a Kindle, the images create short-lived ghosts on the pages before and after, making them feel very animated. And having my daughter draw the images and my son design the cover and layout added an unforeseen joy to the whole enterprise, uniting the bookie’s son with his parents and children, his past and present.

I realized it had been a while since I mentioned any of the books I’ve been reading for my regular column with the USA Network’s Character Approved blog—like the centennial editions of Edgar Rice Burroughs that the Library of America put out. It’s been something close to 30 years since the last time I’d looked at A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes, but those stories sucked me right back in, and the new introductions are pretty interesting—Junot Diaz on the Martian stories especially, but you’ll still want to give Thomas Mallon on Tarzan a look.

I also really liked Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamour in Glass, which I totally expected—after all, I’d enjoyed Shades of Milk and Honey when it came out in 2010, and this was a straight-up sequel. Kowal found a great solution to the problem of what to say about your romance characters once you’ve hit the Happily Ever After; as I noted, Glamour in Glass is “a charming fantasy, a delightful comedy of manners, and a gripping suspense story, expertly blended into one novel.”

Ellen Ullman’s By Blood is on my shortlist for the best fiction of 2012, an exquisitely claustrophobic story about a man who listens in on the therapy sessions being conducted in an adjacent office, then conceives of a mad plan to help the patient discover her birth parents, which just opens up the trauma further. Considering how much of the story comes secondhand, and how little we actually see most of the major characters, it’s a testament to Ullman’s skills that the suspense levels keep getting higher and higher.

On the nonfiction side of things, I was excited about Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine, so much so that I also lined up a Shelf Awareness interview with Lehrer. I’m a big fan of books about creativity, and Lehrer’s blend of anecdotal evidence and explanations drawn from neuroscience research was lively and inspiring—not so much in spurring specific projects, but in terms of maintaining a working environment that will promote creative tendencies.

Then there’s Kevin Young’s The Grey Album, one of the best works of cultural criticism I’ve come across in a long, long time. “[Bringing] dynamic expression to academic rigor,” I wrote, “he picks out the connecting threads of an American tradition that’s always existed, if only we’d known where to look for it.” I’d rank his exploration of “the blackness of blackness,” which covers American culture from the slave poets of the colonial era right up to the Wu-Tang Clan, with books like Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces in terms of its brilliance, and I hope this isn’t the last time Young takes on the essay.

This isn’t all I’ve been reading for the column—if you get a chance, take a look at the archives, where you’ll find plenty of other books I think stand a good chance of capturing your attention and holding on to it. I also hope the column will give you an idea of the diversity of voices contributing to America’s literary culture—a goal I’ve been working on with a little extra diligence over the last few months.

In this installment of Life Stories, the podcast series where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of memoir, my guest is Sandra Beasley, who has actually been featured at Beatrice before—in 2010, her poem “Making the Crane” appeared on the site as a way of introducing readers to her collection I Was the Jukebox. Now we’re talking about Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl, which combines the story of her own life experiences dealing with severe food allergies and a broader medical and cultural overview of what we know about allergies and how we deal with them as a society.

“Food isn’t just sustenance; it’s a way that we bond. And so if you think of all of the times in childhood, all the celebratory events, all the school-organized things—I mean, even the little things, like every month I would win the contest for reading the most books in my class, and my reward was a free personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut. And, you know, in four years of elementary school, nobody ever thought to say, ‘Maybe the girl who’s allergic to pizza, that’s not the best reward…’ Food gets used in all of these different ways, and even now as a grownup, things like traveling on my own, things like dating, things like possibly thinking about having my own children or babysitting my friends’ small kids… it’s all affected by food.”

Listen to Life Stories #8: Sandra Beasley (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

For those of you who don’t know who Sara is, here’s a quick rundown: She’s a former editor-in-chief at Publishers Weekly, and used to run the books section at O Magazine; she’s also the author of So Many Books, So Little Time, a memoir detailing her attempt to read a book a week for an entire year. Although I never reported directly to Sara when I was writing for PW, I did have a fair amount of contact with her, and I’d also see her regularly at book fairs and writers’ conferences—in some cases, we’d be speaking on the same panels about making it in today’s book world… or, for that matter, whether today’s book world is going to make it. She loves books, and from what I’ve seen, she recognizes that books depend upon a thriving publishing industry, and a thriving retail market, if they’re going to flourish.

What does it mean, though, to be the “editorial director” of Amazon.com’s book section?

As some of you might know, I worked at Amazon.com’s book department in 1998 and 1999—not in the position that Sara just accepted, but one or two levels below it. And I hear where Jacket Copy book blogger Carolyn Kellogg is coming from, wondering if we can really call this an editorial gig. I don’t know how Amazon envisions Sara’s job as it exists today; what I can tell you about my job nearly 15 years ago was that my lateral colleagues and I did have a lot of what was called editorial autonomy in terms of choosing the books we wanted to promote, and the ways in which we got those books reviewed, whether we wrote the reviews ourselves or assigned them to freelancers. At the same time, we knew full well that we were working for a bookstore and that the overall mission was to sell books. So, recognizing that just about every book has an audience, I generally made sure to find a sympathetic reviewer for each book, somebody who could explain why you would like that book if you were the sort of person who would like that book. (It’s worth noting that I specifically managed—we didn’t say “curated” in those days—the politics and current events sections, so that specifically meant finding reviewers who could advocate for books that held positions antithetical to my own views.)

There were exceptions—I wrote a not-insignificant number of negative reviews when I was Amazon, for books that I believed were so awful that the responsible thing to do was explain why they were awful—and I never caught flak for that. As long as my section was selling books at a decent clip, and I coordinated with the “store-wide” promotions, I was left to my own devices. In retrospect, it seems obvious that I was in marketing, but that’s not the way we tended to think about it then, nor was it the way we were encouraged to think about it—even when Amazon introduced a co-op program, with publishers paying for sponsored placement of books, it was initially presented to the editors as something that would be integrated with their own sense of which books were worth featuring, not something to which their sensibility would need to conform.

The editorial team of Amazon.com Books was one of the departments targeted for layoffs in early 2000, in what looked from my then-outside perspective to be a shift in emphasis from Amazon.com’s “authority” as a source of book reviews to encouraging greater participation in the “community” of customer reviews. (This was around the time customer reviews started having that “Was this review helpful to you?” survey tacked on; I always suggested it would be a lot more interesting to have that question asked of the “staff” recommendations.) You could make a case for the pendulum swinging back in recent years: Amazon’s Omnivoracious blog was an interesting way of restoring a strong “editorial” voice. So when I see PW describe Sara’s new role as “[giving] a fresh look and voice to the books home page which may include writing a column and talking up books both on the site and at public events,” I have to admit, that sounds like an “ambassador of literature” to me. And though I’d always figured it should be a role that wasn’t linked to any one retail outlet, the reality of the situation is that Amazon.com is one of the biggest players in the book world, and one of the few capable of committing to the resources an ambassador of literature would need to have any meaningful impact. And, given my familiarity with Sara and her passion for books, I think there could be a lot to look forward to here. I wish her luck in the new position, and we’ll see what happens next!

Nick Antosca: We’ve probably only met in person three or four times, but we’ve known each other a while via the tubes. And now we have books coming out at the same time from Lazy Fascist Press—both pretty weird books. You co-authored Anatomy Courses with Sean Kilpatrick. Collaboration’s a tricky thing… I have a writing partner for film and TV work, but I’ve never tried it with fiction. How’d Anatomy Courses come about for you and Sean?

Blake Butler: Sean and I had known each other online for a while, I think, and talked a bit, but never really met or anything more than a handful of emails or such. I’d read his work, though, and felt really compelled by his tone and approach to sentences. We certainly shared a certain panache for the grotesque not just of image but of banging words together, I think. If I remember correctly I emailed him and mentioned that it might be fun to try to write something together, just to see what would happen. I don’t think we realized until somewhere in the middle we were writing what basically (in my mind) has the structure of a novel, though one destroyed of most everything but language and a few recurring ideas about the bodies and locations that the nastiness takes place in.

I think I sent him a page that would be the first page of the book in a document and then he wrote what ended up being the second page, and we just took turns like that back and forth over something like 10 months it seems like, each adding to where the other had left off, but always beginning a new page. We always alternated pages, and the way we seemed to take cues in the flow of it was more semantic, often, than plotwise; the ground continued shifting as we went, which made it fun. I learned a shitload watching Sean’s process: he’s a super meticulous editor, and a voracious revisor of his own work, in a different way than I am, and so each time I got the thing back I’d often find he’d gone through and fucked with sentences all throughout his prior parts, stacking them and beefing them out and manipulating the phrasing and the space. Sometimes he’d get so caught up on a single sentence he’d work on it a week and send it back with a note saying he didn’t want to hold me up, and I’d do mine in like an hour and send it back and he’d go into the sauna again; each iteration just kept getting more and more ornate and fucked and I loved it. We both did our thing and stole from each other and smeared each other around in our own passages, kind of forming a structure out of machine shit.

Finally one day he sent one of those couple of sentence sections saying he’d been staring at the sentence for a week and couldn’t stop tonguing it or something, and I read the sentence and it lopped my head off, and that was the end of the book. I don’t think we ever intended to make something publishable really, and I’m surprised we found a publisher in Lazy Fascist; and of course, once that came about, the revision circus went into hypermode for us both, and the book really started to eat itself.

What about The Obese? That book seemed to come out of nowhere for me, after Midnight Picnic. I hadn’t heard you were working on anything and began to wonder and then all of a sudden there was this new novel, seemingly much quicker than the gap between Midnight Picnic and the one before it, Fires?

Nick Antosca: If you look at the publication dates of my books, it probably seems like I just take three years to write these thin, odd little books, when in reality what’s happening is that I’m writing other books that never get published.

Between Fires and Midnight Picnic there was a weird, loopy novel that’s in a drawer somewhere; between Midnight Picnic and The Obese there was a bad novel that I discarded (a small section of it was the seed of The Obese, though), and then another novel that I wrote and love and have never been able to get published. After that, I started doing more screenwriting and moved to Los Angeles, and then in a very short period of time I wrote The Obese, harvesting an old idea that had been brewing. When I think about how much I’ve written versus how much I’ve actually published, I have to very quickly redirect my thoughts to happier things, because down that path lie madness and an application to law school.

The Obese was one of those ideas that comes to you and delights you even as you’re thinking, well, I can’t write that. Which means, of course, you have to write it. It comes from a conversation I overhead in which these two very skinny women in Bryant Square Park were talking vicious shit about a fat person they knew. And I’d been reading Daphne du Maurier’s short story “The Birds.” So, that happened.

I know some people have been offended by The Obese. One lady on Twitter said she wanted to track me down and punch me in the face. I feel genuinely conflicted when I read stuff like that. There’s a part of my personality that really wants to please people and another part that is reckless and curious and wants to kick over anthills. But I also know it’s death to think, “This won’t offend somebody, will it?” while writing.

How much, if at all, do you think about the reader while you’re writing? Do you worry about sickening or offending readers? Do you worry about pushing them away with the density or opacity of your language, or do you primarily write for your own tastes? You write some seriously challenging stuff, both in terms of form and content; who are you writing for?

Blake Butler: I don’t think I think about who I am writing for beyond the instant, though I do think about writing in phases. Usually the first draft I am trying to think of nothing, to be completely removed even from myself. I’ve found the less I can not only know about what I’m doing, but also the less I try to control it beyond impulse and word to word shifts, the more happy I am with what comes out. It also leads to more interesting configurations of language, for me.

But I also tend to work in bursts and breaks. I like to get up a lot while I am typing and come back when I feel the mood hitting me again, and then stop again before I feel futile. The internet helps me in that way, in that it can be a palette cleanser (or destroyer), and I’m able to keep forgetting and coming back to newly the things I’m playing with.

Editing is also important, as are the jumps between those spurts, which is when I think I try to write like a reader: not like any reader, but by the reader that I am. I am trying to both surprise myself and defeat myself at once, which makes it keep pushing through me in a weird way. I trust myself enough that in the end it will either come out how I want, or I will delete it. Once I’m in the zone I’m pretty good at staying in the zone, for a project, though like you I also will throw off a lot of stuff that never ends up going anywhere. Controlling yourself as a reader, in the way of “Would I be interested in this if I hadn’t written it” is I think super important, and maybe not mentioned enough.

I’ve always found it awesome that you read so many screenplays. I know you also write a lot in that mode, and I wonder if studying the scripts and the films themselves and being active in that area affects how you write fiction?

Nick Antosca: Reading and writing screenplays has definitely affected my fiction-writing, but I’ve always had a “cinematic” sensibility anyway because I’ve watched movies obsessively—especially horror movies—since I was little. Put it this way—as a novelist I turn more to movies than to poetry for inspiration.

When I first started writing fiction, though, I didn’t believe I knew how to build a structured story. It seemed like math to me, and I’m bad at math, and also at planning. Or at least I was then. But screenplays require structure. In a screenplay you’re not really dealing with prose as an art—it’s strictly a tool—so your structure is your art (and to a much lesser degree, so is your dialogue), and I had never really regarded structure that way before. I guess I saw storytelling as a craft, like woodworking, not an art, which in retrospect feels laughabl naive/ignorant. Storytelling now seems to me the highest and most fundamental art.

Also, I feel like if you’re a fiction writer toiling away solo on your novel and you’re stuck on a tough passage/chapter/problem, you can find yourself edging toward what feels like a creative get-out-of-jail-free card—the desire to justify settling with a less-than-ideal solution by saying to yourself, essentially, Well, it’s not perfect but it’s ME, and this is my writing and mine alone, and when I read the great iconoclastic writers I like, sometimes the weird/messy/sloppy parts are the parts I like best, because only THEY could have written those. And that’s just your laziness talking. Writing for movies and TV, which is a very collaborative experience, teaches you not to cheat like that, because smart people you’re working with will point out the problems, and you will be forced to confront them until they are well and truly addressed. And that’s a good thing.

It’s always fun to switch from screenwriting to fiction writing and back again, because they exercise slightly different muscles. But it’s the same arm.

In this edition of Life Stories, the podcast series where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I chat with Jenny Lawson, also known as “The Bloggess,” about Let’s Pretend This Never Happened. We talked a lot about how the blog has connected her with her readers in very powerful ways, and about how she uses humor to write about painful experiences:

“I’ve always felt like if I don’t laugh at the things that are happening, especially the most tragic things, then they win. There have been very few points in my life when something happened that was so bad that I couldn’t laugh at it… Really, for me, humor has been a life raft. It’s helped me to get through it because whenever I feel like there’s no way that I’m going to be able to get over this, there’s something so freeing and wonderful about writing a joke about something that seemed like this terrible monster that cuts it down to size and makes it something that you can deal with…”

We also talk about how she got into collecting stuffed animals despite all the traumatic taxidermy-related incidents of her youth, and I let the interview run a few minutes longer than usual so she could tell the whole story about the time a PR agency tried to get her interested in a Kardashian wearing panty hose and wound up being embarrassed from one end of the Internet to the other. Good times!

Listen to Life Stories #7: Jenny Lawson (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

A few months back, I had the pleasure of meeting Wiley Cash at a luncheon his publisher, William Morrow, hosted to alert some folks to his debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home. As he was telling us about the book, he mentioned something about the multiple first-person perspectives he used to tell the story—like an early chapter written in the voice of the local sheriff— and how he’d actually explored a few other possibilities from among the other characters, which he’d had to abandon for various reasons. And I thought to myself, “That’s a really cool insight. I bet a lot of people would be interested in hearing about this.” And, luckily for me, he thought it was a great idea as well.

“I didn’t know Pastor Chambliss had killed my big brother until later that night.”

This is the first line I ever wrote for what would become my first novel. It’s also the first voice I heard when I sat down to write the story; it belongs to Jess Hall, the nine-year-old younger brother of an autistic boy who’s smothered during a healing service in a little church in the mountains of North Carolina. The original plan was to write a short story from the perspective of Jess, a young boy who witnesses something he never should’ve seen, something he can’t quite understand. But then a strange thing happened; other characters wanted to speak—they wanted to tell their stories, they wanted the opportunity to defend themselves or to blame others or to apologize for the mess they’d made of things.

In this chorus of voices, I heard Adelaide Lyle, the eighty-year-old church matriarch and the community’s moral conscience. She wanted to tell me that she’d taken the children out of the church a decade earlier when the worship services turned deadly after a woman died from a snake bite. Adelaide wanted me to know that she felt responsible for the spiritual and physical wellbeing of the children under her watch, and that she never imagined such a tragedy could befall one of them. She wanted me to know that she’d stood up to Carson Chambliss once before, and she wanted me to understand that she wouldn’t be afraid to do so again.

I heard the voice of Clem Barfield, a local sheriff with his own painful past who’s called upon to solve the mystery of the young boy’s death. He wanted to tell me that he wasn’t from Madison County, that he’d always been an outsider, that he’d always been suspicious of the little church down by the river with the papered-over windows. He wanted me to know that his own life had been touched by tragedy years earlier when he lost his adult son, and he wanted me to understand that it takes a lifetime to build equity in loss, that only parents—not a church or a community—can fathom the pain of losing a child.

I heard the voices of other characters too. The first was Ben Hall, the boys’ father, a man whose pragmatic approach to the world left no room for miracles or the hand of the divine, a man who’d grown suspicious of his wife’s passion for the church and its mysterious leader. I felt Ben—I felt his confusion and his anger and his loss—and I could see him, red-faced and furious with his eyes full of tears as he tried to explain himself through his rage, but I couldn’t quite hear him as well as I heard the other characters. Perhaps this is because he lacked Jess’s emotional distance and confusion, Adelaide’s world-weary perspective, or Clem’s rational melancholy. Or perhaps I just couldn’t understand Ben, a man roughly my own age, because I don’t have children of my own, and like Clem says, I can’t imagine what it is to lose one.

I also heard the voice of Jimmy Hall, Ben’s father and the boys’ grandfather, a man who’d only recently returned home after decades away, a man who carried the burden of being indirectly responsible for the death of Clem’s son, a man whose rage could only be quelled by the booze that fueled it. Jimmy was a man who made excuses, a man who blamed others for his own poor decisions or indecision, a man who would never take responsibility for the pain he’d caused. Because of this, he wouldn’t stop talking, no matter how desperately I wanted him to. If I allowed Jimmy Hall a piece of the narrative pie, I knew he’d crack open a beer, light a cigarette, wait for his turn to speak, and then spill the beans about every major plot point from the beginning of the novel to the end.

“But Jimmy,” I’d say, “readers read toward discovery; they don’t want to be told what happens at the end as soon as they begin reading a novel.”

“I don’t give a shit,” Jimmy’d say, and he’d take another drag from his cigarette and spit something into the gravel at his feet, eyeing me the entire time as if he couldn’t quite trust me. The feeling was mutual.

By the time I realized that I couldn’t truly hear Ben’s voice and that I definitely couldn’t trust Jimmy’s, I’d already written hundreds of pages from their perspectives; I’d built important parts of the story based on knowledge only they possessed. There were things about their voices I loved, and that’s what made the decision to cut their narratives so painful. But, because it was so painful, I knew it was the right thing to do. I’ve never once regretted that decision.

Cutting those two voices from the manuscript left Jess, Adelaide, and Clem to tell the story, and once the revision dust settled I realized they were the only ones who could tell it. These were the only voices the reader needed to hear in order to understand the tragedy and the effect it had on the community. Jess’s voice bears witness to both his wonder at the power of faith and his guilt for questioning its role in his brother’s death. Adelaide’s voice resonates with the purity of belief, and hers is the only voice that can speak for the community as it attempts to heal. Clem’s voice is the voice of the skeptical mind, the mind that grasps toward a certainty grounded in fact and evidence. Perhaps Clem’s is the mind of the reader as well, a reader who understands what it is to be an outsider, who arrives on the scene after catastrophe has struck, who wades through a chorus of voices to uncover the truth.

In the sixth installment of Life Stories, my series of podcast interviews with memoir writers, I spoke with Kambri Crews about Burn Down the Ground, her account of growing up as the hearing child of deaf parents in a rural Texas community. One of the first things we talked about is what motivated her to tell this story:

“I work in the comedy business, and a lot of comedians—when they would find out about my story—they would kind of salivate, almost, over these awesome stories that I had, growing up in the wild, in the woods with these deaf people. Because they’re always mining their lives for material, their day-to-day lives or the past, to try to find something funny to say on stage. And here I’m sitting on this treasure trove of material, and not doing anything with it. Everyone just kept saying, ‘You’ve got to write a book, you’ve got to write a book!’”

It’s not all laughs, though: As her parents’ marriage falls apart, the teenage Crews is forced to observe as her father’s behavior turns increasingly violent—including a brutal assault on her mother that is dismissed as a routine matter by local law enforcement. Decades later, long after Crews had put her hometown behind her, she found out that her father was now being accused of attempted murder, and she needed to decide whether to steer the police towards the files on that earlier incident. (It’s not a spoiler when I tell you that the memoir is framed by a contemporary account of visiting her father in prison.) Because the interview took place shortly after the revelations that Mike Daisey had fabricated several of the details in his dramatic monologue “The Agony and the Ecstacy of Steve Jobs,” we also talked quite a bit about the obligations of truth telling in memoir. It’s a great conversation, and I hope you enjoy listening to it.

Listen to Life Stories #6: Kambri Crews (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).