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201 Wally Lamb Wally Lamb is the author of two novels and the editor of two books of stories written by women in prison. Born and raised in Norwich, Connecticut, he holds BA and MA degrees in teaching from the University of Connecticut and an MFA in writing from Vermont College. He was the director of the Writing Center at the Norwich Free Academy, Norwich, Connecticut, from 1989 to 1998, and is currently an associate professor of Creative Writing at the University of Connecticut. Both of his novels were featured as selections of Oprah’s Book Club. Other honors include the Governor’s Arts Award, State of Connecticut, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He lives in Mansfield, Connecticut, with his wife and sons. She’s Come Undone, 1992; I Know This Much Is True, 1998 You have talked about drawing incessantly as a child, and your fiction is certainly visual. How does your strong sense of the visual come into play during the process of writing a novel? Very often, when the fiction is going well, when it’s going without a whole lot of pain and wheel spinning, I’m seeing it almost movie-like in my head or I’m hearing the characters speak the words. It doesn’t happen as often as I’d like it to, but it certainly happened with both novels, particularly with the grandfather’s story in I Know This Much Is True. A lot of that tale told itself almost cinematically. I think it stems back to childhood, when I was not only incessantly drawing, but watching way too much TV, which oddly enough has come back to serve me in a number of ways—not the least of which was the Oprah book club! I watched TV night and day. I didn’t do a lot of reading, but that visual stuff! I was saturated with story, visual story, when I was a kid. I still think that way. When I was having difficulty working on the screenplay for She’s Come Undone, I sat down in my office and started drawing things out on index 202 the INtervIewS cards, scrawling and sketching at the same time, and sort of throwing the cards around—dealing them almost like tarot. Playing with it that way helped: the flow of the cards, the visual thing. Then I went to the wall with those index cards and masking tape. The south wall was act 1, the east wall was act 2—I ended up with a four-act script. I don’t think I could have cracked the structural problem of the screenplay had I not been using the cards. Did you have a scene on each card, or were there also cards with narrative passages on them? More words than pictures. But sometimes the actual drawing of what would happen, like the surfacing of a whale. Something like that. I did the same thing, or a version of it, with I Know This Much is True. I kept spooking myself with that story because the canvas for it kept getting larger and larger and I didn’t know if I could pull it off. I didn’t know what it meant. Very early on in the process, I had the grandfather’s story and it seemed like it was somehow the beating heart of the whole thing; but I didn’t know how it related to the story proper. I thought maybe using the cards could help me figure out the meaning of the novel that I was immersed in, but I didn’t know how that was going to happen. When was the meaning of the story revealed to you? I wrote that novel in a six-year span. Somewhere around the second year, I knew that Dominick was born to discover the grandfather’s story. Around the fourth year, I realized that it was sort of a cautionary tale. Years before, I had read an ancient Hindu myth about a proud king who’s duped by a beggar—a religious ascetic—and is forced to do his bidding. Forced to humble himself to the task of cutting a corpse from a hanging tree and lugging him to the center of the cemetery. But there’s a catch to the mission: the dead guy slung over the king’s shoulder starts whispering threats and riddles. Ultimately, it’s the answers to the riddles that save the unsuspecting king from...

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