An Interview with Larry Brown

AN INTERVIEW WITH LARRY BROWN Larry Brown Larry Brown lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where he was born and raised. He joined the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War and, after returning home, worked for the Oxford Fire Department for seventeen years. He resigned in 1990 to write full time. Brown is the author of four books of fiction, Facing the Music, Dirty Work, Big Bad Love and Joe, which won the 1992 Southern Book Critic's Circle Award for Fiction. He is also the author of a memoir, On Fire. This interview was conducted by Kay Bonetti for the American Audio Prose Library in June of 1995 at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture in Oxford, Mississippi. AAPL has produced recordings of readings by and interviews with 130 distinguished authors. For information call 1-800-447-2275 or write AAPL at PO Box 842, Columbia, MO 65205. An Interview with Larry Brown/Kay Bonetti Interviewer: You list your hometown as Oxford, Mississippi, where you're still living and worked as a firefighter for sixteen years. Did you actually grow up in the city or out in the country? Brown: I was born in Oxford at the old hospital up the street from the courthouse, but we lived about twelve miles out in the country. We moved to Memphis when I was about three years old. I lived there ten years and went to school in Memphis until the eighth grade, which was in '64, and then we moved back to Mississippi, and I've been out around here all the time since then, for the last thirty-one years. Interviewer: What took your family up to Memphis? Brown: My father came out of World War II in '45, and he farmed for a good long while, but he was having all of us, and just really couldn't make a go of it farming. He had a good job waiting for him at Fruehauf Trailer Company in Memphis so we moved up there. By that point there were six of us altogether, my mother and my daddy and my two brothers and my sister. We had a growing family in a short length of time. I was born in '51. My father came out of the war in '45, and my sister and one of my brothers are older than me. Interviewer: I understand your mother was a postmistress? Brown: She did that part-time until she retired. We had a little store out at Tula that Mary Annie and I ran for a couple of years. Mother would come in and take care of the mail every day. The Postal Service was threatening to close the Post Office unless we could move it into a building that stayed open all day long, so I The Missouri Review · 81 went over and took all the stuff and moved it into my store, and nailed it all back together, and we opened the Post Office in the store. We've still got it out there, too. Interviewer: Is that the store you've modeled John Coleman's store in Joe and the store in the story "Old Soldiers" with Mr. Aaron on? Brown: Actually, ours was a relatively new building. The store that's in my books was torn down some time around 1966 or '67, and had been there for a long time. It had the pot-bellied stove and the patches of tin on the floor, and all the bottlecaps just ground into the sand, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, and the old slick benches out front that had been whittled and had people's initials in them because they'd been used for years. Interviewer: Where did the love of books and reading come from? Brown: Mainly from my mother. One of my earliest memories is of seeing her reading. There were always books in our house. I just grew to love it real early, I guess—escaping into stories and discovering other worlds. When I was a child I was a big reader of Greek mythology. I actually read a lot of literature without knowing what I was doing, because Mother bought a...