Emily's Spotlight: The Curiously Uncommon Andrew Biss. PLUS: Listen to Andrew read from his new book!

It's official. My favorite part of Cents-ible eReads is connecting with the authors. So many interesting stories...and I'm not just talking about their book plots! One author I've had a lot of fun learning more about is award-winner Andrew Biss, who, when not writing novels, writes plays that have received critical acclaim both in the U.S. and in his native U.K. I hope you enjoy his quick wit as much as I do. Keep reading to learn about Andrew's take on the end of the world, what it means to be "absurdesque" and his new release, "A Mouth Full of Ashes," a beautiful audio excerpt of which he graciously shares below.
  
Emily: Ready for your icebreaker? Right now, at this very moment, if you had to think of a title to a story you haven’t yet written, what would it be?

Andrew: Oh, that’s easy. It would be called "How I Made $10,000,000 in Book Sales in Less Than a Year.” I'm hoping to have that one completed in the very near future.

Emily: Ha! Good one.  Like that answer, your stories are always very original (might we call them “curiously uncommon?”).  In your book, “The End of the World,” for example, Valentine “encounters a Bosnian woman with a hole where her stomach used to be, an American entrepreneur with a scheme to implant televisions into people's foreheads, and a Catholic priest who attempts to lure him down inside a kitchen sink.” With cheeky humor, you admit that “then things start to get strange.”  What inspires these kinds of twisted plots?

Andrew: Well, as you'd imagine, each story has its own particular journey from head to page, but in the case of "The End of the World" there were a couple of different things going on in my life at the time which heavily influenced that story. I'd been reading up on Buddhism, simply because I thought I ought to know more about it than I did, and in the course of doing so I discovered the state of Bardo (not literally, thank goodness). In the Tibetan Book of the Dead it's described as a plane of existence one reaches after death but prior to rebirth. While there you may encounter many strange phantasms and apparitions, some frightening, others not. However, unless or until you're able to understand where you are and realize these apparitions are born from your own mind and life experience, you may never leave.

Around the same time, I'd also been giving a lot of thought to writing a story about a young man who'd been home-schooled and sheltered from life's stark realities, who one day suddenly finds himself thrust into the real world - a world he's utterly unprepared for.

And so from those two incongruous ingredients came "The End of the World".

Emily: Give us some insight into your career. What does a “normal” day look like for someone who writes “strange” tales?

Andrew: My artistic journey (yes, I'm gagging right along with you, but I really can't think of a better term to use right now) has been quite a wide-ranging one. I studied art and design at college, went on to pursue an acting career (pursue being the operative word, as I was never able to quite catch up with it), mostly stage work but also some film (I'm in about two frames of Francis Ford Coppola's "Dracula"), then veered off to become a playwright, and more recently discovered the joys of writing prose. As for my writing process, I'll confess to writing the first draft of everything in longhand. A pen and paper - remember them? Perhaps that'll change in the future, and redrafting is done on the computer, but for now I still need that initial organic sensation of ink flowing from my fingertips (not literally, of course, though it would save me a small fortune in pens if it did). I also do the bulk of my writing at night. I've always been something of a night owl, and there's something about darkness that feeds my imagination. Perhaps it's all those of nights of being in the pitch black of a theatre or a cinema and suddenly seeing a whole new world emerge from the darkness around you.

Emily: As playwright and author, your works have been produced in London, New York, and Los Angeles, among other cities. Tell us a little about your plays. Which is your favorite?

Andrew: Oh, they're all my favorites and you know I had to say that. It reminds me of when I was little, and of me and my brothers asking my mum, "If we were on a ship and it sank, which one of us would you save?" Kids, huh! Some of my plays I've now adapted into books, so they're discovering a new life beyond the boards. But if I had to name check one, I suppose I would have to say "A Cure for the Common Cold". It's one of my very few unproduced plays (or perhaps 'yet-to-be-produced' to be more optimistic), but it's also one that I'm most proud of. It's about the death and subsequent cover up of a young RAF serviceman, set during the Cold War years. It involves chemical weapons, secret government facilities, and a whole lot of trickery and deceit. (Though set in the 1950s, you could say it's timeless.) Anyway, it's based on a true, and quite fascinating, tragic story. It affected me very deeply and personally when I first read about it, and I couldn't get it out of my head. Writing the play was the only way I was able to finally do that. Interestingly, it garnered a lot of terrific interest from some of the big Off Broadway theatres, but nothing has come to fruition. The young man's name was Ronald Maddison, in case anyone's interested in knowing more.      

Emily: You have a new book coming out this month called “A Mouth Full of Ashes.” (What an image!) How is it different from your other books?

Andrew: Well, as you can see from my previous comments, I actually wear two hats as a writer. One of them writes in a very naturalistic form, while the other plays a lot more fast and loose with reality. "A Mouth Full of Ashes" falls most definitely into that first column. The idea for it came from an incident that occurred a couple of years back in a small town in the Midwest. A young man with no connection to the town, drives there one Sunday morning, enters the local chapel and shoots the pastor dead as he's delivering his sermon. The pastor was young and had a wife and two young girls. I saw his wife being interviewed on some NBC show, and she was basically just saying how she forgave the killer of her husband completely and that she held no ill will towards him, and that God would forgive him and so she would, too. She seemed quite calm and at peace with it all (it had only happened a few days or weeks before). And I tried to put myself in her position, and tried to understand how one could find that level of forgiveness for someone who's just killed my spouse and taken away my children's father in a random, senseless, brutal act. Frankly, I couldn't. Towards the end of the interview, however, a chink in the armour was revealed when she at least admitted that she may not yet have had enough time to think everything through and that there would likely be difficult times ahead.

Anyway, a ball started rolling in my head, and I tried to imagine a situation in which a young woman is brutally murdered and one of her parents reacts in the same way...and the other one doesn't. How could a couple carry on together under those circumstances? They'd just lost their only daughter - would they now lose each other? Is there a limit to forgiveness?

The book is essentially their evening of final reckoning, as home truths and simmering resentments are laid bare, and each learns painful, often brutal lessons on love, hate, and the elliptical nature of forgiveness.

 

(Listen to an Excerpt from "A Mouth Full of Ashes")

Emily: Favorite thing about wearing the “absurdist” hat:

Andrew: Oh, when I have that hat on it's just so much fun to write. Writing something like "A Mouth Full of Ashes" is a lot more difficult to write in some ways, as you have to get your head back into that very dark, painful space every time you sit down to work on it. When writing something more absurdist you're allowed to break all the rules, go wherever you imagination takes you, and unleash your sense of humor. However, I'm not entirely sure if I fit the definition of an absurdist writer in the strictest sense. Perhaps "absurdesque" would describe it better, were there such a word. When writing in that style, it's a certainly a world of heightened reality, but it's always got one foot on the ground and has its own peculiar logic. I suppose it has a lot to do with knowing the rules before you can break them. I once had a reviewer describe one of my plays as "eruditely absurd" which perhaps says it best.

Emily: Anything else you’d like to mention?

Andrew: Yes, I'd like to thank you very much for inviting me on and allowing me to babble on at will. You've got a terrific site here and I know it's only going to go from strength to strength.

And I do hope some of your readers will check out "A Mouth Full of Ashes," which, though harsh and painful at times, is ultimately something I believe to be quite cathartic. Unfortunately, grief and loss are things we all get to experience. How one handles them...well, that's the tricky part, isn't it?